


Hiraeth

by TheOriginalSuki



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet Ending, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Miscommunication, Pining, Post-TRoS, Rey is so in love, Slow Burn, Time Travel, World Between Worlds, Young Ben Solo, heartsick Rey, jealous Rey, more sweet than bitter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:41:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 47,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22988776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOriginalSuki/pseuds/TheOriginalSuki
Summary: "I don't want to use you.""You wouldn't be using me.  You'd be letting me love you.  Please let me love you."---Rey uses the World Between Worlds and the Force bond to go back to a time before Kylo Ren, hoping to try and prevent the events leading up to Ben's fall to the Dark Side.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 821
Kudos: 824





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hiraeth (Welsh, noun) a homesickness for somewhere you cannot return to, the nostalgia and the grief for the lost places of your past, places that never were.
> 
> Os dach chi'n siarad Cymraeg, croeso. Dysgwr dw i.

> _Hir yw pob ymaros._ All waiting is long. -- Welsh proverb

Rey follows the light-path, winding its way through the fabric of four-dimensional space in patterns that unfurl like ferns. This place -- if indeed it could be called a place -- is both still and airy, like a closed room that has just recently been walked into. There is almost a breeze. It lifts the ends of her hair but goes no further, doesn't touch clothes or skin. For all her preparation, she hesitates. 

She has one chance to get this right.

***

Across various landscapes, shuffled like backdrops on a stage -- in a leaky hut during a flash storm on Ahch-To; on a blue evening in the desert of Tatooine; in the cramped berth of the Millennium Falcon as it swept through the stars -- she studied the ancient Jedi texts. And while she studied, she worked. She searched and gathered other Force-sensitives throughout the galaxy; enlisted competent carers, builders, and teachers; supplicated chancellors and senators and chairmen for aid and grants. She seized her former role as darling of the Resistance and harnessed it to her advantage. After all this work, one day the golden sun rose on the Jedi academy _she'd_ needed -- not Luke's, founded on fractured, antiquated ideology, nor Kylo Ren's, built on chaos, forgetting the past and forging ahead with blind ambition; but hers. A safe place for lonely children; where they are taught not to fear but accept. Given agency. Know that the Force is the tool, not the person. After ten years of steady toil, Rey sits between the warming rocks in the misty dawn and rests. Salt soaks in the air all around. Behind her, climbing the cliffs like an avian thrust into flight, the stone and marble temple seems to catch fire.

Twelve years, she waited. Twelve years to bring the new temple and academy together. Twelve years to stand watch as the Republic put itself together again, like a bone on a splint. Twelve years to train herself, and then Finn. Twelve long years during which she put off her own desire, holding her heart at arm's length. Now, in the new day, a curly-haired little girl clambers up from the slope of the island. The tail end of night gathers below, tucked between silent huts. In the distance, the pearly spires of the mainland city rise like cathedrals greeting the dawn. Rey closes her eyes, feigning concentration. But the child launches into Rey's lap, knocking Rey's rod-straight spine into a scribble.

Rey laughs and loops her arms around the child, like tying a bow.

"Paige! How did you find me!"

"It was easy." The child turns in her lap, settling as though she has found a familiar chair. "You meditate in the same exact place at the same exact time every day, Master Rey!"

"Maybe I should be a little bit less predictable."

"Mom says that about Dad when he tries to sneak out before washing up."

Rey laughed. "You don't know the half of it. She's been catching him in the act for over a decade now."

Paige too laughs -- the artificial and endearing laugh of a child who’s not in on the joke.

"Paige!" A voice bellows up from below. "You'd better get down here and make your bed before breakfast!"

Rey can picture the hut the owner of the voice has exited from -- rather, the brick-and-mortar one-room womb that incubates a tender, intimate family life. She feels a pang of loss for something never hers.

A figure crests the curve of the hill, obscuring the sun. Paige and Rey blink in momentary shadow. Then the man steps toward them, sinking into the springy peat. The rosy light pools around them, and he pivots on his haunches, facing the same direction they do, to greet the rising sun. "What are you two up to?"

"Meditating," Paige says.

"Considering the wisdom in obeying one's betters," answers Rey.

Paige looks up at her with a scrunched brow. Rey winks.

"Go on," the man, Finn, tugs a tuft of his daughter's hair. "Finish your morning chores and let me talk to Master Rey a minute."

Paige scrambles up, dipping into a pirouette, lands a kiss on her father's cheek and scampers away, her laughter trailing and iridescent, like bubbles.

"I don't think she's Force sensitive, Rey," Finn says quietly, staring after her.

"We didn't think you were. And look how you turned out."

"Yeah, but she wants it so badly. I don't know how to break it to her. She's already well past the age of dedication."

Rey shakes her head. "Doesn't matter, Finn. Everyone has their own unique path. Just because it looks different from another's doesn't make it any less important."

He puts his dark eyes to her. "You're leaving us soon, aren't you?"

This is not the Force he's using. This is his own brand of intuition-reinforced empathy.

She smiles. "You've learned so much, and -- really, you've surpassed me in every way, so --"

"Don't say that," he shakes his head, talking over her even as she goes on, " _don't_ \-- don't say that."

"--you don't need me anymore, Finn. None of you do. It's time for you to become the master. It's time."

"How can you say that, Rey?" he rotates his torso to face her. "You -- you were my first friend in the whole world. You know more than anyone what it's like, to be adrift without a mentor. You've been a pillar of this landscape since most of the younglings could barely walk. Paige hangs off your every word. Rose gets out to the city but she doesn’t really connect with the other Jedi and their families the way she does with you. Where will you even go? You've been so adamant that this new way, this new order, would right the wrongs of the previous ones, don't -- don't exile yourself the way he did."

Rey only smiles. She holds her hand palm-up to him.

Finn rears back, like a beast drawn to reign. For a long while he just stares at her proferred hand. Then his face softens, like butter in the morning sun, and he takes it.

"I'll miss you," he says. The texture of his voice is a net, holding back tears.

"No one is ever really gone."

***

It is neither light nor dark, warm nor cold, here nor there. It is the World Between Worlds, a place she sought and studied and seduced from the cryptic pages of the ancient Jedi texts until it stood out one day stark in her understanding and beckoned to her. She found the ruins of the Lothal Jedi Temple and deciphered the oblique glyphs. Followed the light that rained sideways, chasing loth wolves. Held the small bag to her, container of all her temporal possessions, unsure if she would even be able to pass through with the clothes on her person. There is no going back, she knows. It is possible she may never find her way out again. And if she does, the odds of her making her way backwards, like following footsteps in the snow, are so finite she is sure she will never step back into this moment -- into this here, this Rey -- or rather, _that_ Rey, who steeled herself, held the loves and pains of her brief but substantial life to her as though an old friend -- and _let go_ \-- walking into the triangle of space opening into the starry void before her.

As she traces the light-paths in the star field, she reaches out with internal feelers for something she has not sought for twelve years, not allowed herself to seek. A silky pool of darkness, shot through with strands of light like live wires -- magnetic as a black hole -- nebulous, tangled, erratic, vital. _Him_. A chiaroscuro of a soul, anchored to hers with an unseen thread, long enough to let him wander to the ends of the universe, and yet bring them together with a twitch.

She senses him. From a corner of the in-between, the no-place into which she plunged. The substance of him -- molecules, carbon, biological mechanisms so common and miraculous -- alighting her every nerve and neuron. _There_. Through a narrow door, the surface like wind moving over water. He is there. He is well. When she reaches for him, this time, there is no hesitation.

She has waited twelve long years. She has waited long enough.

***

Her steep submersion, from the dull hum of the World Between Worlds into sun-drenched jungle, disorients her. Nausea sweeps her in a wave. She can't find her footing. In a panic, she reaches for him again -- for _Ben_ \-- only to find the line broken. Not dead like before, no. Incomplete. In fact, it's never been. Not in this reality, not in this timeline. This new loss -- so close on the heels of a long-awaited consummation -- skewers her. She swallows a feral cry, and falls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Did you catch this man?" asked the colonel, frowning.
> 
> Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. "Yes," he said, "I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."
> 
> \-- G.K. Chesterton
> 
> \---
> 
> I am embarking on something I just might finish. And a first -- I have a beta! Thank you to @englishable, who is a wordsmith in her own right and very, very insightful.


	2. Chapter 2

> _Teg yw edrych tuag adref._ It is good to look homewards. -- Welsh proverb

Rey comes back to herself with a jolt. Something, some sepulchral, stale presence, has nipped at her experimentally, tickled her synapses. She flounders to throw up barriers. It is her good fortune that the presence is only curious, remote. She is able to muffle herself, using a skill she cultivated over twelve years, and then some.

In her rush toward Ben, she nearly forgot Palpatine.

Rey knows, since she has followed Ben's Force signature here but cannot feel their bond, that she has landed in the not-distant past. The her of this time is very likely somewhere, perhaps on Jakku already. But that child is not yet awakened. The Force can't find her. And if the Force can't find her, neither can Palpatine, neither can Snoke, neither can ... _Ben._ (Is he Kylo Ren yet?) But she, the Rey sometime-Skywalker, who rejected the name of her wicked grandfather to keep that of her loved ones' alive, thirty-odd years and fully Force trained, will have created a disturbance in the Force vibrating down the pipelines of material space. She knows that. She's anticipated, trained for it. She also knows it could mean her time is limited.

The blood-coloured light fades as she blinks open her eyelids. She lies in the warm shade of a thatch-and-reed roofed hut, not unlike the ones on Ahch-To, on a modest but serviceable bed. The temperature and climate are much like the location of her restored Jedi temple, but its Force signature differs. It smells different, too. Its wet is heavier and its scent a lush, jewel green. She sits up, feeling for the canvas bag -- did it make through with her? -- to find it bundled in a corner in a swatch of yellow sunlight. She climbs down from the bed and goes to retrieve it.

"You're awake." The voice runs familiar pathways down her memory. It is almost humorous. A bit rough. A lot wry.

Rey stoops to her pack, turning toward the voice.

Out of the way of direct sunlight, her former master sits, legs crossed, warming his hands on a ceramic cup of steaming tea. His face bears less lines than she remembers. His beard, trimmed and only just touched with gray. But he is the same.

He regards her with that kind of muted wisdom, the one that looked out at her from the ruined island on Ahch-To, and she thinks, this is what he was like, before. His robes enthrone him. His chin held high. His eyes, though, soft and kind.

Then she has not come too late. Luke Skywalker is not in exile. The Jedi temple stands.

"I had you brought here, I hope you don't mind. I felt you the moment you arrived, from ... wherever it is you've come." He's playful. If he considers her a threat, he doesn't seem concerned. Rey wants to laugh out loud; throw her arms around him and then punch him, thoroughly. But she settles for pressing the seam of her mouth shut against a smile.

"Yes. Yes, of course you did. Master Skywalker. I've come to join you. If you'll have me, that is."

"Oh?" He sets down his cup and quirks a smile at her. A lead weight sinks from her stomach into her toes. That smile, so much like Ben's. "And from whom, pray tell, do I have the honour of such an offer?"

"My name is Rey."

***

Master Skywalker asks many questions. Rey answers as best she can. She tells him, truthfully, that she has previous training but that she cannot disclose by whom. 

How has she come to know of him? 

Who doesn't know of the famed Jedi and Rebel pilot Luke Skywalker? 

What of her parentage? 

She believes she is an orphan. 

While they talk, Luke has food brought -- Jedi youth, so very like her own, patter in in robes, and she wishes she could slip away and watch him with them, the kind of mentor he was before his sorrow; but he follows protocol in the presence of a guest and politely ignores them. 

They eat. The shadows grow long in the hut.

Now that she is here, Rey sees that she is utterly unprepared; the plan, haphazard and cobbled together during sleepless nights, book-ended between days of pouring herself out, desperate to keep forward momentum, now shows its weaknesses. Poorly thought-through, impulsive. How many times has she scolded her students on this very flaw? She should know better! Her motives for seeking a way to the World Between Worlds boiled down to one urgent, innate, long-suppressed desire: get back to Ben. Find Ben, and go to him.

Rey dreamed sometimes, of being with him beneath a star-strewn sky, more feeling than picture. When she let herself think, handling hope fragile as glass, she imagined them together again in time and space, believed they would pick up exactly where they left off: he would fall into her like a traveller come home at last. Whatever his sins, whatever the penance, they would navigate what came next _together_. How utterly foolish. Even if twelve years of growth, history, and ageing had not changed her, what was to say he’d be the same?

Now she seems to have stumbled into a different time, a time before. And the repercussions of her being here clamour for her attention. How long can Rey exist if there is another _her_ elsewhere in the universe? The only other successful, known movement through the World Between Worlds was to snatch a Jedi from the brink of death and bring her to a timeline from which she was absent. If Palpatine is alive, though undetected, can he be stopped? If so, how? How much can she divulge to Master Skywalker before she frightens and alienates him as she had before, in her past and his future? What would he do then if she were to come clean? Would he shirk her, a child spawned from the Dark? His Force Ghost had told her he knew she was a Palpatine. But would he know that without the inevitable omnipotence of union with the Force in death? Would he even believe her? Would he call her mad?

Or worse yet -- what if, having told him all she knows of the future, she prematurely sets the uncle against the nephew? What if her being here quickens the descent toward an inevitable future?

Her mind maps out avenues of action. When she was a scavenger, lowering herself into the cold bellies of dead star ships, she would mentally go over routes of escape, should something go wrong -- say, a sandstorm pick up unexpectedly; or the decrepit framework collapse and block her exit. She falls back on the habit now.

The door to the World Between Worlds, even if she could find it again, has surely closed. She could hijack a ship, find her way back to the Lothal temple, and try again. But the truth is that for all her study, she knows little of the mechanisms of time beyond the dimensions she occupies. And going back to the World Between Worlds is an unpredictable path. She has no way of knowing if she could pass through successfully again.

The decision asserts itself, solid in her gut. Rey has lived her life. She has found some solace, and she has known purpose and a family, of sorts. If by interfering with this time she is able to spare _this_ Ben from suffering but snuff out herself in the process, so be it. The timeline of her Jedi temple, of Paige and Finn and Rose and the rest, will go on without her. If she cannot stay, then let her stay but a while, and be near the other half of her soul.

No, she will not willingly risk putting herself away from Ben. Not when she has come, for the first time in twelve years, so close to being whole again.

Master Skywalker watches her with interest, and she puts the thoughts away behind a wall of studied disinterest, lest he tune in on her without her consent. Still, he has noticed _something_. 

"You're hiding a very significant part of you, Rey-without-a-last-name. But somehow, I believe you have good reason to. And that it will be revealed in time."

Rey sits before him, and for the time being her panic subsides. She allows herself to savour the feeling of being under the shelter of another's wing, a dependent in the shadow of a master -- though she is more than likely his equal at this point in time, her being older and him younger than the first time they will, in some future perhaps not to come, meet. She'd not let herself feel how tiring it was, holding herself upright all this while, until now. Now she is met with the temptation to collapse into someone else's strength. She supposes she has never stopped longing for a father.

"If you'll permit me, Master ... may I ask you a question?"

He likes that, she can tell, and he tilts his head for her to continue.

"What year is it?"

His eyes flash, but he answers without prying.

"And ... do you have among you ... certain proteges ... working at the temple?"

"Several. If you wish to curry favour with me you are going to have to earn it, young Rey. You may have raw talent well-honed, I can sense that much from your mere proximity. But those who have been by my side for the majority of their lives have proven their competency and loyalty in a way you have not. You understand."

"That's not what I meant."

He studies her. "What did you mean?"

She wants to ask, of course, about Ben. His nephew. His padawan. Where is he? What is he doing? Does he wear his hair long or short? What about a beard? Does he lean forward when his interest peaks, or did that come later? What about the way he works his jaw when he’s in thought? What is his day like, and how does he greet the morning, and what is the last thing he sees when his eyes close to sleep? What does he love, and what does he hate, and what makes him laugh? Does he laugh? Oh, please say he laughs! 

But she does not, cannot answer.

Luke leans back, as if to get a better view of her. For a long time he says nothing, and it is all Rey can do not to burst into tears. They must ripple over her face because Luke softens. She thinks he might put a hand out to touch her arm but he doesn't, and she is glad because she might very well have cried. "You've been on a long, weary journey, that much is clear. You may rest here tonight and join my students tomorrow. If it is truly your wish to be a resident of this temple, then you must earn your keep like the rest. Consider the next couple of days a probationary period."

Rey straightens and nods, eager to show her willingness to conform and integrate. Whatever it takes to stay.

"I don't know how familiar you are with the rules of a Jedi community, but you will be expected to know them shortly, and abide by them. To start with, there is no leaving your domicile after curfew. So if you go straight to sleep now, you may not go out to stretch your legs or explore the grounds until sunrise tomorrow. 

“Oh, and ... the lightsaber in your pack. Might as well carry it where everyone can see it. You get me?"

"I understand."

"Good." He sweeps his robes out behind him to stand. She scrambles up as well, in a show of respect. "Whatever brought you here, young Rey ... I think it is not a passing thing."

She lowers her eyes under his shrewd gaze lest they betray her. Then he leaves.

As soon as he is gone, Rey grabs her pack and sits on the bed to rummage through it. She takes out the un-ignited saber, placing it beside her on the bed. There are a few scraps of clothing, a figure made of twisted wire (a gift from Paige), several holos, and a large black shirt worn thin by a decade of wear. Satisfied that all is accounted for, she packs everything away again and clips her saber to her belt.

There will be time enough in the lonely night to ponder her next move, or the wisdom of moving at all. For now, all she can think on is the hunger to lay eyes on _him_. To see for herself that he is safe and well. Then she can breathe.

When she steps out of the hut she walks into a wall of heat. It is not unpleasant, and nothing like Jakku. Her body absorbs the green and growth even as her mind registers it. It is different from her Jedi island, where she chose to make a home. For one, this place is isolated, a colony separate from civilization. For another, it is much bigger, sprawling where her little academy climbed upward and clung to rocks. Still, there are the familiar landmarks of her religious order, the huts, the children running up and down paths laughing and bickering, apprentices in fields practicing with training sabers, and the imposing temple rising above it all. The slant of the sun tells her it is just about to set. It streams sideways into her eyes, and she turns on the path, to face away from it, just as a low-lying cloud curtains over the horizon and dims the brightness to a tolerable pink.

She stops. Everything stops. The universe on a pause button. Because he is there. As though her want of him grew so potent it put on flesh and blood the way a man put on clothes, to parade before her. Ben, a giant with sloped shoulders clothed in the robes of a Jedi, comes around a formation of rocks scattered like broken teeth; walking, his head bent toward another in conversation. Rey could close the distance in a burst of effort. One sprint over the few yards that separate. 

And she would run, oh she would run. He is so full of his own pulsing self, but -- even here, now -- he holds back. The long, tapered face set on a thick, pale throat. The scattered marks, as though he were made by a flick of ink-stained fingers. The too frank lips. His eyes, though. His eyes have not yet hardened. He is still soft on the potter's wheel, soft but formed, and the eyes that look out at her, without any whisper of recognition, are the eyes of a wounded animal, all trust-and-dodge-and-try-again. His eyebrows lift, pulling his lids upward, emphasising a roundness in them that makes him _so_ youthful. He can’t be more than twenty-three. She's not seen him look free from the lintel of a heavy brow, except the once -- on Exegol. Then, he'd been all light, transfigured. Here he is dim, though not dark. For all his holding back, he has not yet donned the mask. 

She wants to sink to her knees and put out her hand, palm open, the way he had to her. Beckoning. Don't run. I won't hurt you, I swear.

Everything real and riveting in her presses toward him, her soul diving toward his, and it draws his glance, of course it does. He looks at her for one fugacious moment and sees her, without recognition. There is nothing in his eyes for her but a vague sense of displacement. As though someone has moved an object in a familiar room but will soon adjust to the change. He doesn't know her. 

He doesn't know her.

Then the cloud passes and the sun bears down on him. He ducks his head away from its stare, and like that, his attention is elsewhere. Someone speaks to him. He nods. Replies. She can feel more than hear the tenor of his voice; it thrums in her blood. He walks away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by @englishable, who saved the story for collapsing internally with her well-placed questions. Seriously guys, plot is my biggest weakness, please thank her by reading and/or subscribing to her on here and tumblr.


	3. Chapter 3

Ben can't meditate. If he meditates, he'll fall asleep. Which is how he finds himself, after an unscheduled nap, putting aside his calligraphy set and walking out to the tall grass to practice forms. 

He'd dreamt; the kind of dream that shatters upon waking, shards too small to piece back together. But its impression lingered. It was so unlike his usual dreams, the ones that give him no rest in sleep and put him at risk for daytime dozing; they are dark and full of tension, the walls of a cell pressing all around him. Ben often feels a prisoner of his own mind. No, this dream had been wide and open, laced with sweetness and aching. Like the dream-memories of home, when he'd first been sent to the Jedi academy at a fragile ten years of age.

The sun has started its downward path, blotting out the moons into white oblivion. As it simmers into a mellow orange, the moons will show their faces anew, mingling their silver light with its gold. Sometimes Ben feels trapped. There is no corner or shadow not assaulted by light sooner or later. He hates the thought of all his ugliness exposed.

He walks the bend around the broken-stone formation but pauses a moment; lifts his head, a mammal sniffing the air. Something is different about the place. It ripples the Force all around. Before he can touch it, it darts away and is hidden, like the dousing of a lamp.

Just then, a warm voice greets him, and he turns toward it -- the bald and genial head of his friend Tai, refulgent in the late afternoon. Ben's smile is weak but genuine.

"I thought you practised meditative calligraphy before the evening meal," Tai says. He falls into step with Ben, who continues toward the field where he likes to train.

"Trying something different today. Want to spar?"

Tai grins, showing off his teeth. They are neat and uniform, where Ben's are crooked. "I thought you'd never ask."

Ben smirks. Tai is not competitive, not in the least. He is one of those inscrutable people who is not repelled by intimacy. Ben doesn't quite know what to do with it; but he knows Tai will respond favorably to any invitation Ben offers him.

They are nearly masters in their own right, reared in the temple since before puberty. They became men together, with all the pains, discomforts, and initiations accompanying that transition. They will use their light sabers to spar, not the one designated to padawans for training, because they have earned that privilege and can be trusted to mindfully handle them. Ben supposes Tai is his best friend. When he guessed that there was more to Ben, that Ben resisted falling into ease and repose, Tai came closer to knowing the deep-down parts of Ben than anyone else.

It makes Ben even more desperate to hide himself.

They take their stances in the sea of grass. Without speaking -- rather, in answer to an unspoken assent -- they slide into motion. The warping sound of gliding sabers; the smell of singed grass; the beating sun; everything converges on them, ennobling the unplanned into a work of art. 

Ben is the stronger fighter. But he has never had good grasp of his internal climate, something at which Tai excels. Extremes of emotions, Master Skywalker taught them, upset the balance in the Force. It was his earliest and most abiding lesson. On a good day, Tai gives Ben a challenge. On a bad one, like today, he manages to best him. He knocks Ben back, who loses his balance. He tumbles into the grass, his saber extinguished.

Tai turns off his own saber and puts out his hand to help Ben up.

"There's something on your mind," he says.

"A lot of somethings," Ben mutters, evading the underlying question. "Ready?"

Before Tai can nod, Ben ignites and swings. It is no bad faith jab. Tai, as Ben knows, is more than capable of dodging. Tai somersaults and lands on his feet, switching on the silver-hilt saber. It plunges to life, a pulsing blue. The exact colour of his eyes.

Some youths that have been fetching water to and from the kitchens loiter to observe. A third calls them away again: "Master Skywalker wants food brought to him!" Tai and Ben fight on. As the sun descends, the two men grow weary, and arrive at a draw.

The bells chime in the temple, calling the Jedi to evening meal.

***

Ben feels it, like the passing of a shadow over the sun. As he and Tai travel the dirt-and-gravel path. Someone has fixed on him. He would say it is like being watched, except this is more than seeing. He is _aware_ of someone else's awareness. Of him. Not in the way of the Force, of consciousness touching consciousness. It is more ordinary than that, the dregs of an evolutionary trait from the time before language, now lost to memory; different from the ever-present voices, who lurk the corners of his mind, silent, sometimes bursting into his foreground to demand conversation, as if in the very room with him. 

Discomfort heightens his senses. Tai is still speaking as they emerge around the broken rocks, but Ben's eyes are drawn forward. A figure stands before a commonplace and uninhabited hut, a few yards away. The caustic sun tries to seal his eyes, but he makes out a woman: of average height, dressed in undyed, practical clothing. She is not particularly young, but neither is she old. His eyes flutter to her hip -- she carries a lightsaber -- and circle back around to her face. 

This he only allows himself a heartbeat to take in. He descries a disarming openness; as though he is prying into something private. He shouldn’t look. Something this raw cannot be for him. 

He glances away, his pulse rising; leans toward Tai; gives an automated response. Their path steers them away from the hut and the unknown woman. The sunlight wavers; the landscape goes dark beneath a shuttered cloud. As though Ben has summoned it with his precognition. He wants to look back at the woman, to make a better study of her turned up nose, the broad cheekbones, the parted mouth. The wisps of hair haloing her face. But she is none of his business. 

If she is to become his business, Uncle Luke will make him aware.

***

Rey doesn't know why she does what she does, only that her feet follow. 

He is tall, so tall, a man grown but gentler, younger of years. War has not yet wracked him. But neither has life been kind. She recognises the plod of a soul encumbered. He carries himself beneath an invisible yoke. 

She is not aware of the curiosity coming off of those around her; she only just manages to retain the damper on her Force signature. Fear seizes her -- for Ben, irrational though it may be. That he will be snatched away by sinister claws, right out from underneath her; that she will wake in a distant time and place, only to find that none of this was real.

Rey trails after him at a distance, a satellite caught in his gravity. His hair is short, and combed away from his face; he is clean-shaven. He moves with a proficiency that belies the over-largeness of his limbs. His companion is a man of similar age, with a smooth, hairless scalp and eyes so blue they are almost fluorescent. Rey does not particularly notice him. Nor does she notice that as they walk, youths in Jedi attire start to join them from all directions -- tributaries feeding into a path that finds its delta in a large, low building where the community takes their meals, and the surrounding kitchens.

The place is typical of a hall where any monastic order gathers to eat: sparse, orderly, with long wooden tables set out in perfect parallel. The diners sit on benches, while those whose task it is to serve this cycle convey dishes and jugs, bringing them to table. The people (of all shapes, sizes, and species) come in and fill gaps on either side, greeting one another, sharing news and laughter, but sober as they take their places, preparing for the pre-meal meditation. No one will touch food or drink until all have settled. 

Rey has presided over many a similar meal. At first, her handful of students sat cross-legged on the bare ground around a communal cauldron bubbling over a makeshift stove. As the years drew on, the numbers grew, and they began to court the interest of wealthy patrons, she and Finn and the others were able to address the housing needs of their burgeoning order. With growing attendance to temple and residents at the academy, Rey cobbled together a rule of life from what she knew of the Jedi order. The texts in this instance were useless, all ideology and lofty moralising. Nothing in them about the practical day-to-day of a Jedi knight. She lifted what she could from her interactions with Master Skywalker during their brief time together and the folk stories and traditions surrounding the order.

Rey liked to sit among her younglings but recognised they also needed explicit signs of her place in the hierarchy, lest their failure to respond to order hinder their own growth and well-being. It had been difficult for Rey, she who reared herself, with no higher authority than nature and the threat of starvation. Finn was likewise at a loss. Storm troopers were only products to the First Order, engineered for the purpose of war. In the end, it was Rose -- and her cherished memory of the authority of an elder sister -- who helped Rey learn how to discipline. If the padawans and younglings of Luke’s were taught the same, they would recognise an elder as soon as Rey entered, seeing she carried a lightsaber; they would, even now, be preparing a place of honour for her, as hospitality is the bedmate of obedience.

However these things are far from her mind. She is too taken with Ben’s near proximity, with the sumptuousness of the Force signature radiating from him. Her proficiency with the Force has only grown during the intervening years, and feeling him again after so long intoxicates. She cannot be the only one taken with it. Once more, she panics. Palpatine is surely aware of him.

Swamped as she is, wading as best she can through the impressions and fears coming at her, Rey does not see the youngling stepping around the corner, balancing a tureen of broth. The youth stops just before making contact. But Rey, too far gone, knocks into the steaming broth, causing the dish to fly. It shatters on the tiled floor, and Rey slips. 

She is not aware of a fall; only that one moment she is on her feet and the next slammed to her aching hip. The pain shoots through her pelvis and into her spinal column. She grinds her teeth.

Someone lays hold of her and helps her to stand. Rey grips an arm. White starbursts retreat to her periphery; her vision clears. 

Ben -- long-faced, wounded-eyed, ineffable Ben Solo -- looks down at her -- oh! she forgot how very _big_ he was, a brooding mountain of a man! -- and it is all she can do not to let her injured pelvis give way, falling face-first into him like her own, long-lost bed. 

He is so near -- and his smell, his warmth, the vibration of his being in the Force all around them, ruthlessly potent. His face is not the closed steel trap around the limb of an animal, but the natal caution of a flower just come to bud after a long frost.

God. He's _beautiful_.

He has let her go some time before, but now his fingers come up to hers. He carefully pries them from their grip on his forearm. Rey allows him to do this, docile beneath his touch. He could wrench her arms from their sockets, twist her body into a knot, throw her into the sea or fire, and she would not resist. She would let him. He drops her hand and the loss resonates in her skeleton.

Still, he lingers, and she is aware of nothing else: not the pure and absolute silence in the hall, not the unquiet stares; nor the fall of dusk into early evening, rousing light from the flaming torches and lamps. 

Rey basks in Ben’s presence, a desert reptile in sunlight. It is so, so _good_. She's forgotten what it feels to be this _warm_.

Her hand quakes, travels outward, hovers over his slackened face. Ben watches her; he does not flinch away. He lets Rey touch him, feather-soft, tracing an unseen line down his right cheek and over his jaw. She keeps her fingertips there, as though his head is a marble sculpture and her hand the pedestal.

" _Rey_."

Her name, quiet, resonant, is a bitter rebuke from her Master. It pierces the warm drunk haze like a cruel ray, and the spell disperses. Ben darts and speeds off, going she-knows-not-where, only away from her, fleeing between the long rows of tables punctuated with staring faces, through a doorway, and into the new night. 

He sweeps past an erect and stone-masked Luke Skywalker, whose eyes flint at Rey in guarded uncertainty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A brooding mountain of a man -- wink wink wink.
> 
> Thank you @englishable for asking the best questions and building me up with your enjoyment and support. Thank you to all who are reading. Thank you for sharing the love of these characters and this world with me.


	4. Chapter 4

Rey realised she loved Ben the way a trickle bursts into cascade. 

When he walked the same plane of existence, she took for granted that he was there. She felt indignant that he could permeate her, even when she shut the bond. A person can shut a door; still the knocker asks to be let in. 

She was too hurt to answer. She nursed her scorned loyalty. She was so sure he would turn for her, and his betrayal ached more than her bruised pride. She put their so-recent connection and affinity away. It was nothing, had been nothing. If she thought about him often, well -- of course one would think of the enemy in time of war. It wasn't until, running him through with his own lightsaber on the Death Star ruins, she faced for the first time the harrowing possibility of being without him. 

Rey knew she loved him, in that moment, the way she knew how to breathe. Instinctual, necessary, without having to be taught.

"I did want to take your hand." She let herself say it for her own hearing, as well as his. "Ben's hand." Just you. _You_. Not what you think I want but what I _do_. 

The almost-loss of him shook her down and caused her to flee with death at her heels. Better to hide herself away than risk a world without him. I f she could harm him, for whom her soul reached like a flower for the sun, who could be safe from the darkness within her?

When he threw himself in after her, quite literally, on Exegol, it felt like waking after a troubled sleep. Here, at last, things were right and real. When she realised what he had done, pouring out his life to revive her, broken from the inside out, gratitude flooded her and she kissed him. She pulled away to the uncertainty straining across his face. Oh no! She loved him, but -- her love wanted completion, something to close the circuit. Her smile flickered like flame. She tried to fortify herself against the thought that her love was unwanted -- too tired and weak to try to face why it should sorrow her. 

Then he smiled. And everything in the galaxy succumbed to the beauty that was that revelation.

The universe took him away from her.

Rey'd lived a decade and then some since she returned from Exegol, sans half her soul. Through the years she'd cultivated her love, sheltered it, and kept it safe. It was too precious for the eyes of others. Yet those with eyes and intuition could see. She loved him in everything she did. 

When she bent over a youngling to heal a scraped knee, she loved Ben. 

When she stooped to draw water, or gather kindling, or harvest vegetables from their humble garden, she loved him. 

When she stood in honour at the quiet ceremony that bound Rose and Finn together body and soul, it was an act of love for him.

The day Finn told her he was going to be a father, he called her out with four words: "It's him, isn't it?"

And Rey realised that her love changed her and defined her and underscored everything she did and said. He'd noticed, of course he did. Even if he were not a Force sensitive, Finn's empathy was the strength and weakness of the good-hearted men and women by which they won the galaxy.

Thank you, she thought. Thank you for noticing. Thank you for showing me. "Yes," she said.

After that she opened up a little. She might mention something in passing: "Ben would like that," or "That reminds me of Ben." The younglings chalked it down as just another quirk of their Master. And Finn, with the grace of a friend, let her be herself, know herself, without judgement.

When Paige was born, tiny and squawking with a red face and fists of vengeance, Rey held her with tears streaming, and loved her for the both of them.

***

Rey follows Luke out of the hall, clutching the pieces of her heart. Her worst fear prowls from the shadows and shows itself, threatening; she has squandered her chance; she will be sent away. She doesn't know what she will do if that happens, can't even think beyond the devastation of that possibility. Beyond that threshold lies something truly desperate.

In the soft night, the floral-and-fruit scent of the jungle heightens. There is almost a stench to the sweetness, as if the vegetation has put on too much perfume. Moisture is thick in the air, already dewing in the grass.

Master Skywalker takes her into a cloistered garden. It is deceptively simple of form and shape, drawn up with careful attention to lines and balance. A masterful Jedi trick, giving one a sense of rightness in the world, putting the unawares at ease. There is a quiet pond and a jointed plant Rey knows from her travels called bamboo, which has clearly been transplanted here and carefully maintained. Master Skywaker has not spoken the entire time; they have only walked a few minutes since his brows furrowed toward her like those of a falcon, and he beckoned for her to follow. He has not looked at her, and he does not look at her when he sinks into a meditation pose by the side of the pool. Rey knows to come and sit herself next to him; to remain silent until he speaks.

The pause lengthens. The stridulation of insects magnifies in the absence of speech.

Master Skywalker says, eyes closed, "Perhaps I have been too lenient in accepting you here, without pressing further."

Rey says nothing. Nothing she can say will help or hinder her.

Master Skywalker sighs. Blessedly, he lets drops the wise master veil and looks at her. Rey's heart is in her throat, eyes reflecting with unshed tears.

"You won't tell me why you asked me what year it is, will you?"

Rey struggles to swallow. She shakes her head.

He returns his glance forward. "Then I won't ask. Not yet, at any rate. I've lived long enough, and wide enough, to know that not all things can, or even ought to, require answers. You've carefully guarded the wavelength of the Force that ripples through you -- oh, yes, I noticed. For what reason do you hide it, I wonder? It certainly cannot be for my sake. And I like to think myself a middling judge of character. 

“There is no lie in you, young Rey. You would not be capable of deception, not even if your very life hung on the skill. Your body betrays itself."

Now she knows if he is thinking about her reaction to Ben. Of her magnetic and focused draw toward him, in plain sight for all to witness. Once again, she fumbles with her helplessness, with the mixture of shame at the lack of self-control and the weightier impulse that craves what it craves.

"However. You can appreciate that your ... _interest_ … in my sister’s son is troubling -- I believe you know of whom I speak, that he is my nephew. It is clear to me that he does not know you, but that _you_ recognise _him_ \-- in some capacity. I have reason to be protective of him, other than the nature of our relationship, and I think you know why. … Do I need to say it out loud?”

Rey’s stomach curls, and she thinks she might be ill. Of course Luke Skywalker would believe her draw toward Ben is his power. “No,” she says, trying to steady her voice between gritted teeth. “ _No_ it is not his proficiency in the Force that put me in a compromising position tonight.” She steels herself for what she is about to say. “Forgive me, Master. The young man -- he reminds me of someone I knew, a long time ago. Someone I loved, who died. I will try to be more mindful in the future.”

He nods and makes a sound in his throat, half assent, half question. She feels him looking at her, wondering. He knows there is more to it.

He doesn’t press further. “Even so. You will be placed under the care and supervision of one of my junior Jedi. This Jedi is loyal to me and has proven her trustworthiness." He stands abruptly. "Come."

Rey can hardly walk for the relief coursing in her. The numbness of arms and legs transition to tingling and a growing warmth.

They leave the seclusion of the garden and walk back toward the eating hall. Luke gestures for her to wait outside the door. When he comes out again, he is followed by a young woman with white, braided hair. It offsets her dusky skin and crowns a face of subdued but spiteful determination. Rey recognises it; she has seen it in students before. The spite is not for Rey, though, never for Rey. This woman is eager to obey, eager to please, and Rey senses that the brunt of her aggression falls on herself.

"Voe, this is Rey. She will be bunking with you with the young apprentices."

Rey looks at him, catching on. He has placed her not only under the authority of someone devoted to him, but in the company of many children who will be able to keep eyes and ears on her, without even knowing they serve as chaperones.

"Voe, please take Rey to gather her things and get her settled."

***

Voe is full of the humming vibrancy of youth, as though the Force in her has been set to a live current and might at any moment set off a spark. Rey wants to ask her about Ben. She is of an age to be his peer. The questions squirm to get out; Rey keeps them to herself.

It is good fortune, then, that Voe does not seem interested in Rey at all. She goes over her instructions methodically, pointing out the buildings of the academy and their functions. There is a communal bath house, a library, a weapons armoury, a medbay, the meditation garden Master Skywalker led Rey to -- in addition to the personal accommodation of the masters and Jedi in residence. The younglings stay in a dormitory, with futons in rows pushed up against either side of the wall. All is streamlined and orderly; but here and there Rey spies the signs of childhood: a rumpled corner of linen from a friendly tussle; the arm of a fabric doll from beneath a pillow.

Voe's own bed is at the head of the room, with a private chest at its foot. The younglings must share storage space for their belongings. A curtain partitions Voe's space from that of her charges. Rey assumes this is a girls' dormitory, but Voe’s place of seniority merits her extra privacy.

Voe motions Rey to one of the neatly made beds among the troops of others. "You can keep your things with the children, or, if you prefer, next to your bed. I do warn you, though, they consider anything out in the open to be 'fair game' and free for perusal."

Rey nods.

Voe crosses her arm, looking her over for the first time. Rey is too weary and too experienced to feel intimidated. "You're far too old to be a late-enrolling padawan -- plus the lightsaber. But you're not a visiting Jedi, or you would have been given more honourable accommodation."

Rey sits on the edge of the bed with her pack in her arms and says nothing.

Voe shrugs off her silence and goes on, "Master Skywalker has given us leave to miss evening meditation, in order to get you comfortable. After tonight, you'll be expected to live according to the rule like the rest of us. We keep a very steady rhythm; responsibilities are on rotation. There is the gardening, the housekeeping, the kitchen work, the supervising of the younglings and the library maintenance. The curfew is strict and non-negotiable. We go to bed early and rise with the dawn. There are only ever seven hours of night here, sometimes less. It's why everything is so green. We get up at first light every day, without exception. I advise you to sleep when you can."

With this final instruction, Voe goes to her curtained corner and closes herself in. Rey sets down her pack; pulls out the worn black shirt; buries her face in it like a child at its mother's breast. She sits for a while, trying to draw out the powerful scent of Ben Solo that so recently engulfed her. It is faint but present. 

Rey strips off her clothes, folding them into haphazard packages. She gathers them up with her pack and places them in the open shelves where the younglings keep their clothing and few possessions. She keeps the shirt and the lightsaber. The former she pulls over her head and arms. Its hem hits her mid-thigh, and the sleeves are too long and baggy, but she wears it with the ease of familiarity. Clutching her lightsaber, Rey peels the covers off the bed and slides in, closing them back up like a seal. She tucks the lightsaber under her pillow and pats it down. Curls up with her knees to her chest and drops into dead sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to get this out before the weekend, so all mistakes or plot holes are mine, despite the careful eye of the peerless @englishable!


	5. Chapter 5

> _Bûm gall unwaith - hynny oedd, llefain pan ym ganed._ I was wise once: when I was born I cried. -- Welsh proverb

When the woman fell, Ben didn't mean to go to her. He didn't mean to do a lot of things, all his life. He felt as though his entire history was a series of missteps, a manual of mistakes. And this was just another one. But for a moment he swam in her sea-colored eyes, and forgot. 

She touched him. It was strange for many reasons: one, no one touched him, not ever, not since he was a small child riding the shoulders of Chewbacca. Two, it wasn't awful. It wasn't awful at all. 

Then doubt struggled for dominion in him; he plunged from the sun-dappled shallows of her eyes into cold familiar depths. Uncle Luke said something. Ben didn't hear. It broke her intense focus on him and he pulled away and ran.

He runs for the jungle wood, bright in the light of the moons, striped with shadows. He finds his footing easily over well-trod paths and came to a still pool, its face lit like a fourth moon. Ben strips off his clothes, dropping them in a trail as he descends to the shore. There is no hesitation, no need to brace against the shock of cold, as he steps into the water, sending ripples out in widening circles.

He swims out to the center where it is deepest and lets himself be held in the water like a hammock. He is all mass and muscle, but the water takes away the weight of him, and it is a relief not to feel heavy, if only a trick of gravity. Reclining in the pool, he breaths in through his nose and out his mouth. He wants to be nothing but his mind is a racket. Who was that woman, and why did she touch him like that? Why did she have to look at him like she saw right through to his ugly soul? For a moment the Force flickered, and he caught the gilded edge of something powerful in her. This makes sense. Ben is always sought by the powerful: for his legacy, for his unasked-for strength.

He remembers becoming aware of Snoke gradually. It is a strange thing, to never be alone. One doesn't know what "alone" feels like and so doesn't know that he is always watched. The first time it occurred to Ben that perhaps not everyone hosted a symbiotic shadow, he was frightened. But Snoke spoke to him, comforting. _You're special_ , he whispered. Ben didn't see any reason not to believe him. The voice, even when silent, was a known thing; the way one knows when one is thirsty or cold. Snoke taught him many lessons, but they all came back to that one central truth. Ben was special. Specialness was a thing that possessed him. He was not his own.

Even now, Snoke prods him, feeling around for the source of his distress. Not now...don't ask me now. The inquisitive presence caresses him, a feeling like the rough tongue of a cat on raw skin.

_Tell me._

_There was a woman, s-she --_ wanted _something from me; though I've never seen her before in my life._

_Oh, my young friend. Of course she wants something from you. Everyone wants something from you. It's only a matter of time. The question is -- what?_

Ben shuts his eyes against the sting.

***

Rey wakes in the darkness. She senses bodies around her, breathing in sleep, and detects the lumps of shadow that are the children lying in their futons. She slept so deeply. It is as though she blinked out of existence. She feels under her pillow. The hilt of her lightsaber is textured and cool, and it soothes her. Now that she is awake, she itches to get up and prowl. But she remembers Voe's warning and Master Skywalker's questions, and she wills herself still.

She lies still while her thoughts toss her about like a ship at sea. She slides into un-sleep, neither restful nor refreshing. The next thing she knows, there is a voice at the door, and a litany of responses in sleepy voices from the beds all around.

"There is no emotion, there is peace."

"There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is harmony. There is no death, there is the Force."

The children are rising, clambering over their mussed sheets to sit cross-legged at the foot of their beds. Rey joins them in the gray of dawn for their first morning meditation. After about five minutes, the girls begin to get up, still in silence, and move about the room: some make their beds, others go to the shelves and dress. As more of the children finish meditating, they are emboldened to communicate in rough whispers. Soon the trickle of whispers flood into youthful chatter. Voe draws aside her curtain and stalks out.

"All right, everyone, all right. Try not to cause too much trouble this early in the day."

Rey thinks on her own younglings with fondness. Surely seven hours a night is not enough sleep for children whose brains haven't finished developing. The asceticism of the Jedi order is a calling, that is certain -- but is it a calling that can be entered into with consent, from those who have only just begun to grapple with the consequences? She thinks about the small cluster of huts on her rocky island. The Force sensitives she gathered to her there came with families; Rey would not part them.

Voe stands over her with mild expectation. "It's chores and then breakfast. You and I are going to the bath house, so you had better throw on something presentable."

Rey nods, her neck stiff, and reaches for her lightsaber. She is dressed and ready before the last youngling is out the door.

***

Rey daren't look around for Ben at breakfast. She sits with Voe at the table overseeing the younglings, which provides her distraction enough. She feels the moment he comes in. But she eats mechanically, placing spoonful after spoonful of porridge into her mouth. Don't look, don't. _Look_. Does he see _her_ , though? What is he thinking? 

Rey is hit with a swift and winding blow: is she ... is she _pretty_? 

She has not wondered such a thing in years. Not since before Finn and the Resistance, when she had too many hours left between the day's scavenging and the inevitability of sleep, weary though she was. 

As a child, she would wrap herself in frayed tarp and string together the hollow shells of seeds to make jewellery. Both things would inevitably crumble after a few weeks’ use. Still, she got use out of them while she could, pretending to be a princess or a fine lady, who blessed all her subjects with her keen insight and magnanimity. Later, she imagined a prince, too. He would declare his intention to marry her upon sight, and whisk her away to a kingdom where food was set out all day and they would eat any time they pleased. They had seven children, one for each day of the week, and foiled every kidnapping plot levelled their way. If ever she and the prince were called away on royal business, they would hug each of them and promise to return as soon as they could.

_I’ll come back for you, sweetheart, I promise._

It was a phrase that haunted her, like the refrain of a song lost to memory. Even the voice -- if there had been a voice -- evaporated, leaving the words like brittle leaves, skeletons of themselves. Her most prized possessions.

(No one came back for her, in the end.)

Little Rey kept her hair neat and out of the way, always the same three buns at the back of her head -- it was a matter of safety when scrounging for parts or ducking out of conflicts; but one day she wondered passingly if it suited her. The dull scraps of metal she collected reflected only a hazy projection. She had to ask around for days before she found an actual mirror. When she at last peered into the glass, she found a freckled, sun-tanned face looking back at her, with a broad forehead and a small nose, and hunger-hollowed cheeks. She set the mirror face-down and didn't look again.

Rey wishes that she'd taken more care in the bath house now. Her buns hang damp and limp. When she leaves breakfast, she decides, away from the food, she will let them down to air dry. She studies her nails, as if her uncompromising evaluation alone could clean them. She feels the skin of her face and frowns at the texture near her temples. She ought to have scrubbed better with the soap.

Voe wants to be about her business, so when she sees that Rey is no longer eating, she stands and tells her to follow. Rey has to measure her footsteps with her breath, to keep from turning and searching for Ben among the crowd.

***

Voe and Rey supervise the younglings during morning lessons. Master Skywalker appears, after taking his morning meal alone. (Voe whispers to Rey that he meditates for hours at a time, while the rest of the school prepare for the day.) He greets the children with jocular familiarity, using their names, asking about scores to be settled and races to win, and Rey refrains from rolling her eyes at his bluster. Yet there is authority in him that no goofiness overshadows. The children sense this too. After an extended lecture, Master Skywalker tells them he would like to see how they apply the principles of the morning's topic. The children divide themselves into small groups and circle around. Master Skywalker goes from group to group, giving instruction and praise as is warranted.

But Master Skywalker is not here for the children's sake alone. He is assessing the newcomer, gauging how much she knows, how she works with the padawans. At last, something in which Rey has confidence. She has spent the last twelve years of her life cultivating her skill, as instructor, as mentor. Rey is grateful to give herself over to routine. She can lose herself in this work, and forget Master Skywalker is even here.

The day is divided halfway through by the second meal. This returns them to the hall, but Ben does not come with the others, giving both relief and distress. After eating, there is quiet time, a time of intentional silence. The academy falls into a second, voiceless language, one of gesture and observation -- one must carefully consider the need to communicate, first seeing if one cannot attend to a matter oneself. If not, then, and only then, does one trouble oneself with improvised signs. Then the afternoon lessons for the younglings and padawans, and finally -- recreation!

This is the most beloved part of the day, and Rey cannot help but partake of the candid joy of the younglings, who abandon all decorum and take to the wood and the grasses like feral creatures. Voe puts Rey in charge of monitoring a game of tag, while she attends to her own interests. 

Watching them blows air into the shallow wound where Paige resided. Rey swallows tears. The little girl is safe and loved. Her sorrow is hers alone.

As she gazes and interacts with the children, half-imagining they are her own, Rey spies Ben passing at a distance. She would know him from his long stride, the way he brings one foot near the other, almost clapping them together like a dancer, though he were disguised from head to toe. He passes behind the library building.

The children play. They are content and distracted. She would reprove a lesser Jedi for what she is about to do. But she does it still.

Rey seizes her opportunity by the throat. In the span of six seconds, she is two yards away and turning the curve of the building. She doesn't see him, so she veers around the second corner and -- there! He has stopped, facing her, arms crossed over his chest, his gaze a stony precipice.

“Why are you following me?”

The look on his face is of something she'd not thought capable -- it is the look of someone for which wariness is second nature. The determined confidence of Kylo Ren must have come later.

No, no -- don't look like that! She is desperate to get it off him. Desperation simmers in her like a low-grade fever.

She holds up her hands palms-outward, as though approaching a capricious beast. "I need to explain ... about yesterday."

His brows sink lower. But his eyes trail down her and back up.

"I didn't mean to be so forward, it's only that -- you surprised me. Because -- " she plunges ahead with the truth; she has already disclosed as much to Master Skywalker, " -- you look so much like someone I used to know. Someone who died. Forgive me."

The way he half-turns his face, while keeping his eyes on her, tells her he's considering this. It emboldens her, and she takes a step toward him.

"My name is Rey." She touches her chest. As if to say, here is my heart, if you ever wanted to look at it -- just ask.

He turns his face fully toward her, and she is relieved, his wariness subsided. "Rey what?"

"Just ... Rey." She wants to laugh. But she will not risk startling this precious creature.

"I've never met anyone who didn't have a family name," he says. 

She likes his voice. It is deep, without gruffness -- a poet's voice. Hearing it again after all this time is jarring but oh-so-welcome.

She smiles, a plaster smile that goes nowhere near her eyes. "Well, I don't have a family."

He watches her, apparently gauging the sincerity of this claim. "I'm sorry," he says. Her admission lulls out his latent empathy. Then, a lopsided smile transforms his face. "You can have mine."

It is a bad joke, and meant that way. But it lands in her, an arrow in the tender meat of its victim. She struggles to keep her face composed.

"I'm Ben," he says. "Ben Organa S-"

"Solo," she finishes.

"Y-yeah."

Oh no! She has made him uncomfortable, _again_. "I--"

Before she can scrabble to reverse her latest blunder, Voe manifests like a bad dream. She’s come around and stopped at Ben's elbow. "What are you doing?"

The question is meant for Rey, but Ben looks at her and says, "Have you seen Hennix? I'm supposed to go over some scrolls with him this afternoon, but he's not in the library."

"I don't know," Voe says. She asks again, "What are you doing with Rey Nobody, here?"

"Nothing." His reply, far too quick and far too short. He backtracks the way he has come, passing Rey in a gratuitously wide arc. 

Voe looks at Rey; Rey looks at Voe.

"Well," the white-haired woman says, dull-eyed and straight-mouthed, "you wouldn't be the first person to throw yourself at the famous-and-powerful Ben Solo."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More on Ben's motivation and Snoke's involvement coming up! Thank @englishable for her invaluable contribution: read Paradise and be ye satisfied with the only TROS ending that matters.


	6. Chapter 6

Snoke wants Ben to watch Rey. To wait and see. Ben is not so sure. He wants to stay away. He doesn’t like being _seen_.

But he doesn’t mind seeing. It is not hard to let his eyes drift toward her in the communal hall. She is one of a handful of adults sitting with the younglings. Her hair drips wet down the back of her neck; and the sight triggers a memory, not of his own, but of one of his dreams. The ones he has from time to time; they are not bad dreams, and they haven't the texture of a dream; they are rather like watching a holo play all around him. He gets the sense that the script is set; as he moves, helpless to the strings of fate, he is flooded with moods, impressions. Not as one is subject to one's own passions. It is similar to the experience of peering into another's mind with the Force, except even more so. 

The dreams started shortly after Ben first left home for Luke's academy. He wonders if this is his mind's misfit way of coping. They were fuzzy and closed, like looking at the world through a warped glass. Over time, they congealed and he could make out concrete objects.

At first, the dreams bothered him. But they were less painful than the rest of his dreams. They somehow felt less lonely. He'd taken to giving himself over to them, grateful for a night's reprieve.

The dreams always take place on the same desert planet. Ben thinks perhaps it is Tatooine. He has never been there, but he knows Uncle Luke grew up on a moisture farm, under the merciless glare of two suns, raised by an aunt and uncle. It was one of 3PO's favorite complaining-stories. In the dreams, however, Ben is always alone. He sleeps in an abandoned and broken down AT-AT. He is curious to look closer, to gauge where he may be, but is never allowed. In the day he plies through wreckage and lugs it away. He is not permitted to take in the carcasses of ships in their entirety. This is irrelevant to him. He zeroes in on important parts, parts that will give him food. The dull tooth of hunger is constant in his belly. His fears are succinct and swift. He cannot afford to think too far ahead. There is a large ugly man, in particular, who looms ever present. He is the one with the food. He hates him. But his hate is a fatal thing, cold and not changeable, as his hatred in waking life. He is waiting for something, that much he knows. He keeps a tally on the metal surface of the hangar that is his shelter. Each day a little more of him hardens, and each day, he has to knead it, working with care, to make it malleable again. He has no idea from where this capacity to hope has come. It is not like him. Not like him at all.

He harkens to one dream in particular: he is among a crowd of other people, raggedly and ruggedly dressed, skin leathered by heat and hard labor. There is arguing, shouting. Some kind of riot. Ben knows he needs to get out: he is only small, in this dream, and he will be trampled. The people clamour around a caravan of goods trying to board a cargo ship, to sail far away from them; they believe they have been cheated. The anger all around swells. When it crashes down again, there is a noise as of the release of pressure. A hiss as of a hundred snakes many yards away. And then something wet, spraying his face and his hands and his hair. 

Someone set off a blaster and punctured a massive tank of water. It shoots up and over, a miracle of desert rain. It placates the people, who stop and stare up in wonder. Ben thinks an old woman cries, but he cannot be sure it is not the mist setting a gleam to everything. He remembers the feel of the water so acutely, the hush of the mob-turned-congregation, the way he stuck his tongue out to extend every surface and expose it to moisture ... the wet trickle on the back of his bare neck.

He'd woken that morning with a mighty thirst. Even after he drank his fill, gulping and gulping the clear cold water directly from the pump, a dryness stayed with him for a long time.

***

The woman goes with Voe, and Ben goes to his studies. 

His routine is just as structured as when he had been a padawan, but now he is free to choose it for himself. He likes to spend the mornings in training. Even better if he is alone. 

He can get lost in the indefatigable push toward perfection, even to the point of working, like today, through the midday meal. Better, you must be better. It's what you're good for. If not that, then what? He loves the Jedi art, with the love someone has for one's parents. It is complicated and perfunctory. He hadn't chosen this himself, maybe wouldn't have, in a different life. But it is his.

When he was a child he wanted to be a pilot, like his dad. His father's ship was a brother to him. His father put Ben on his lap and showed him all the controls, the subtle language of love developed between pilot and machine, over a lifetime of devotion. He was allowed to fly her himself shortly before he was sent away. A natural, his father called him, leaning back in the co-pilot seat with his lopsided smile.

But, as his father might have said, it was not in the cards for him. Ben’s behaviour grew increasingly erratic. They sent him away.

When Ben wraps up training, he retreats to the bathhouse to wash away the dirt and sweat. He goes for a walk, as he is wont to do, during the silent period of the day. Afterward, he runs into Hennix and they agree to meet at the library later. Hennix is cracking a coded holocron and wants Ben's opinion. In the meantime, Ben returns to his hut, intending to read, but his mind is skittish. Unlike with training, when his body and soul fall into a trance, the convoluted and obscure works of his Jedi predecessors stimulate him. He finds himself frustrated, desperate to understand. This is when Snoke slithers in and says it's all nonsense.

Ben doesn't want to summon Snoke today. So he puts aside the scrolls he has taken from the library, reaches for his calligraphy box, and smooths a fresh sheet of paper. He writes.

_I do not know why_

_the moon's path never brings her_

_near the fickle day._

***

Hennix is not in the library. The great tentacled fellow has likely been distracted, by some amusement or other. He can't just enjoy things without taking them apart to understand them. That is his way.

Ben wanders the grounds of the academy during recreation, hoping to run into him. He feels the presence of the strange woman, just over a ways, where the children play. Her Force signature is muted; it does not itself signal to him. He marks her vicinity with a different kind of instinct, the way a blind man still turns his face to the rising sun. For a moment he can observe her unawares. She looks invigorated, amongst the gaggle of children, who run and shriek. She looks like she might gather them in her arms and carry them off, kissing and cackling like some benevolent witch in a fairy tale.

When she notices him back, he retreats. She follows. He is both intrigued and repelled. What does she want?

He gathers his courage and asks her.

He has not braced himself for the sight of her, flushed and short of breath, with her hair loose and fanning all around her. The part of her lips. He doubles down on self-preservation.

"Why are you following me?"

She looks taken aback, but he cannot tell whether it is from the question itself or that he has stopped to confront her. She makes a mollifying gesture.

"I need to explain ... about yesterday."

He looks her over. He half wants an answer and half doesn't. Just like he half wants to run away and half wants to stay.

She explains that he reminds her of someone deceased. That she was taken off guard and acted out of surprise. She _apologises_.

_Oh_.

Ben is not sure what to make of this admission. It is bad form for a Jedi to react so violently. Either she is poorly controlled or this person -- the deceased -- meant very much to her. It is it this revelation that softens him.

She says, "My name is Rey." Rey. It rings a small, clear bell in his mind. Of course she is Rey. She was always Rey, even when he did not know it.

She does not have a family name because she does not have a family. This is a startling concept to him. He has never thought to approach a person with the consideration that they may not have grown up like him, with squabbles and storytime and tuckings-in, in the chaos and comfort of a too-human family. For the first time in a while, he wanders near the possibility of his unappreciated privileged. Snoke does not allow him to think such things for long. Ben instinctively shies away from it.

So he tries an awkward joke, and forges ahead with an introduction. She's offered her name, so he might as well give his. Especially seeing as they're going to be living together at the academy. He doesn't have to tell Snoke this, if he doesn't want to. Some things can be just for him.

... Can't they?

But she finishes his name for him, and he freezes. There it is again -- that damned legacy, clinging to him like dead skin. Voe chooses just this moment to interrupt. He’s not sure he hears her. His voice acts of its own accord. He asks after Hennix.

"I don't know. What are you doing with Rey Nobody here?"

Nothing. Not a thing. Not me. Just the projection of Ben Solo, the legacy -- whoever he is, whatever he wants. The name that costs him everything. Stupid to think that for once, in his whole life, he could have something just for him.

He departs, putting as much distance between himself and Rey as he reasonably can. Snoke knew. Snoke always knows.

***

When Voe's words settle into meaning, Rey's mind darts to the unprecedented -- who? Just _who_ has thrown him or herself at Ben Solo? Then recognition rises, sanguine in her cheeks -- a reaction Voe surely sees as a damning indictment.

She looks at Voe, the full-figured and commanding woman, in the flush of youth. Is Voe one of these "persons"? If so, does he -- does he _return_ the sentiment? Rey doesn't know what to do with that. During their brief time together, Rey enjoyed a position of priority, of focus in Kylo Ren's plans -- if _enjoy_ was the word, and _plans_ included the subjugation of the galaxy. During the longer time, while he was gone and missed, she thought back on his life, with mixed fondness and sorrow. She'd gathered some information and keepsakes from among Leia's personal effects.

She'd been led to believe -- and understood it to be so, as the Force bond connected them -- that Ben had been a cloistered and then solitary child who grew into a reserved man. It never occurred to her, that she should be jealous of paramours. Perhaps because the idea was such a foreign one to herself. Not since she conjured a prince in her castle-of-scraps had she thought of that kind of companionship. Her primary longing had always been for her parents.

Growing up was hard enough without the added burden of being a woman. She got what little lessons she could from some of the female scavengers, and a kindly crone gave her scraps of absorbent fabric and showed her how to use them. Rey knew how babies were made. It was a simple fact of life. She did what she could to protect herself, learned how to fight, how to ooze signals that she was _off-limits_ , like reverse pheromones. She couldn't imagine giving herself to someone that way. It seemed awfully silly. Impractical. Wouldn't sand get everywhere?

In truth, she didn't even think much on it after she lost Ben. Her grief for him obscured all else. It was not until little Paige was born, and Rey placed her in the arms of her loving parents, that she was seized with the full and devastating knowledge that this could have been hers. And -- rather than make her recoil or blush -- it made her sorry. Sorry that she would never get to share this with him.

Ben was the only person she'd ever considered intimacy with. And she believed, when he smiled to kiss her, that he could want her in that way, too -- or would have, perhaps, if he'd been given the time and the space to come back to himself. They were already unified in spirit. It only made sense to consummate that union. She thinks of the time in the hut on Ahch-To, when she'd reached out her hand to him and he'd reached back. Even without the Force bond spilling his uncensored insecurity directly into her, she would have known it was the first time he had been touched in a very long while.

Rey trails back to the children, a silent Voe following. Whether Voe believes Rey keeps her silence out of shame, or knows that she has sent Rey's mind reeling, Rey can’t guess and doesn’t care to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With schools being out starting Monday I'm not sure how much I'll be able to write over the next few weeks. As always, thank @englishable for keeping me motivated and steering the story! All mistakes are my own.


	7. Chapter 7

Ben never does find Hennix. Instead, he spends the rest of his day preoccupied and distant -- so, no more out of character than usual. He ignores Rey during the evening meal, which feels exactly the same as trying not to scratch an insect bite. He leaves early, agitated and hungry.

Uncle Luke often takes his meals privately: this allows him more flexibility in his personal schedule, but it also means he can be hard to find at any given moment. Ben is fortunate, then, to find him at the temple praying. He sits beneath marble pillars, legs crossed and brow serene. Ben sits beside him, noiselessly.

After a few minutes, Uncle Luke says, "What is it, Ben?" He doesn't move an inch, nor open his eyes.

"Do you remember," Ben says, "when you first brought me here, and you told me, you would never withhold from me what was mine?"

"I recall saying something like that. Why do you ask?"

"I want to know about that woman -- the Jedi. Who is she? What is she doing here?"

Luke chuckles, and Ben turns sharply to look at him. Nothing has changed on the master Jedi but the idle smile.

"You are always in _such_ a hurry, young padawan. Some things that we seek answers to are --"

"--are better remained unanswered, I know."

"And other things that we believe we shall never understand are revealed to us in time. Why do I say these things?"

Because, you never give me everything, Ben thinks bitterly. It was a lie. You always hold back. Just like Mom -- there's something, _something_. "To teach me patience?"

"There is no emotion, there is peace."

"She seemed to know me."

Now Uncle Luke opens his eyes, and Ben pays attention. He can sense a tiny impurity, a spore of discomfort in his uncle. "Yes, she does seem to."

"So who is she?"

"She is not ready to say."

Ben's temper flares. "You mean to say, you admitted a strange Jedi to our academy, without reference and without explanation?"

Uncle Luke heaves a sigh. "There are ... things ... about the Force you have yet to learn, Ben."

"I'd like to learn them, if you'd teach me!"

"These are not things that can be taught."

"Like what, for example?"

"Every choice we make -- or fail to make -- leaves its own impressions on the fabric of the universe. For us, they are irreversible, but we are confined by this," he pinches his arm through the fabric of his tunic, "crude matter. When we are liberated and are absorbed into the Force, we are lifted upward, and we see everything that was with everything wasn't, all the things that are with what could have been, branching off like the limbs of the tree. All of these limbs, all of these realities, exist at once. Who is to say which is the true path?"

Ben's jaw locks. He huffs out through his nose. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"It has to do," Luke says, "with your question. And the young woman. When she arrived here, it was sudden, and the energy of a different life clung to her."

"What do you mean? Are you saying she is from one of those … one of those alternate branches?"

"Perhaps. A different version of our own universe. It could be so. She hides her Force abilities well. But her signature, the way it danced, the flavor of it -- for a moment it was too familiar. I thought ..."

"What?" Ben leans toward him.

Luke shakes his head. "Well, I thought, for a minute, that it was your mother."

"You said Mom gave up training and never became a full-fledged Jedi."

"She did. She didn't. But -- in another world, who knows? Perhaps Rey comes from a place where you and I and Leia are all here, together. What I do know is this. Things will play out the way they are meant to."

"How can that be, if you've said there are many paths, many branches?"

"Are they not already present? If so, then they exist, and there is no need to fear them."

Ben thinks. He isn't sure he agrees. But then, he never seems to be in agreement with his uncle.

"All things will be revealed in time," Luke says, by way of excusing him. The sun lowers itself in the sky, and the time grows near for evening meditation.

***

The entire community comes together for meditation at day’s end. It is the last ritual before bed. They face the setting sun and mentally recount the day: what they learned, and what they mastered; what they forgot and what they failed. Then they are to blend out of being, to be as one with the Force as they ever will be this side of death. Ben cannot bring down his pulse or regulate his breathing. Into the unquiet silence, Snoke speaks.

_What troubles you now, my boy?_

_Nothing_ , he thinks, too quickly. _I mean, just more of the same_.

_Did you find out about the woman...?_

_Not much... Uncle Luke refuses to disclose anything._

_No. How like him to be dismissive. Luke Skywalker fears your power. He prefers your docile._ _He will withhold what he can from you, to keep himself in a position of authority for as long as he can._

Ben hates when Snoke talks this way about Uncle Luke. His hackles rise, ready to deny, to defend. But he can find nothing with which to deflect Snoke’s accusations.

_It is possible this woman keeps some skill or knowledge, that would be to your betterment, to your mastery and advantage?_

Ben prickles. He is a voyeur, watching the pathways of his own mind: he folds Rey away from Snoke, in the tissue of his brain, deliberately obscuring her name. Despite her insult, despite the utter futility of it, he wants to keep her to himself. If only for a little while.

***

Ben ignores Rey for the next few days, and she treads lightly. She still watches him, as best she can without drawing attention to herself. She worries for his safety, in body and mind. She wonders how far Snoke has burrowed into his brain, and watches for signs of her grandfather's parasitism. Rey cannot just walk up to Ben, in all his guarded glory, and ask after the nature of an intimate voice he hears in his head. That would not go over well. Master Luke might even exile her. What then? She believes she has some time before the falling-out of uncle and nephew. For now, she decides that she will work to earn trust and watch for any signs of distress from young Ben.

She also watches Voe around him. There are no obvious indicators of a relationship of an amorous nature, and she draws a breath in relief. Unless they are meeting outside of curfew, stealing time and kisses, Rey does not know when Voe would have a chance to sneak off without her. She is thoroughly devoted to her appointment as Rey's keeper. A strong Force user, and Rey likes to think had she come to her academy, she could have earned her respect.

Unfortunately, Rey learns exactly what Voe meant with her caustic comment, when she sends Rey to watch Ben out in the training fields one balmy afternoon, sparring with the padawans. The teenagers, particularly the girls, flock to him. Rey can't help it; she smiles. He is perfect indifference. His brows frown in concentration. He steps next to a red-haired girl and takes hold of her wrist, lifting her arm with the instruction "higher." The girl stifles a giggle. Ben blinks and leans back, like he can't tell what about proper blocking stance is so funny. 

"He's good, isn't he?"

Rey starts. So absorbed in watching Ben, she’s failed to mark the approach of the bald, blue-eyed gentleman. He steps up beside her, flashing a disarming smile. There is nothing artificial in it. It is as homegrown as the little vegetable garden on the further side of the bathhouse. 

She smiles back. "He is."

"The name's Tai." He extends his hand and Rey takes it.

"Rey."

"The thing about Ben," Tai continues, "is that you have to work really hard to get close to him. He's like one of those armoured luggabeast -- plated and protected, but only because he's all soft and tender inside."

Rey looks at Ben, then back to Tai. "Why are you ... telling me this?"

Tai eyes find Ben again. "The way you watch him, when you think nobody's paying attention. I'd know that look anywhere."

Oh. _Oh_.

Rey doesn't expect to feel so much ... kinship with this man beside her. She doesn't deny what he's claimed. They both watch him for a time.

Then Rey says, "You're his friend, aren't you?" She means it in the platonic sense. He has all but admitted to one-sided affection.

"I hope he knows I am."

"Is he ... happy?"

Tai sighs. "That's not a question anyone can answer. But him."

Rey thins her lips and nods. She likes Tai. She likes him a lot. She doesn't want to think about whether or not he is competition for the secret throne in Ben's heart. She does not wish to begrudge Ben a true friend. But her scavenger instincts run deep. She's found Ben again, after all this time. She will _not_ let him go.

As if to test her, fate prompts an older padawan to lean deliberately into Ben's chest, as he tries to adjust her footing from behind -- and she is no giggling ingenue, this one. She is a luxurious Twi'lek, wide of hip and smooth of lekku.

Said scavenger instincts clamour to the surface. Rey’s territorialism seizes her, and she has not made a reasoned, measured decision before she stomps off into the grass to insert herself into the unfolding scene.

Ben, being -- well, _Ben_ \-- has already stepped away from the unsolicited contact, but Rey addresses the padawan without introduction. "You should never keep your feet that close together when bracing for an attack."

The bold exclamation robs both Ben and the padawan of the will to reply. Rey puts her hand out to the girl's shoulder, pushing gently to demonstrate. "Balance," she says, "is not just a word on which Master Skywalker fixates." The girl rocks, which forces her to widen her feet. "There. Like that." Rey nods. Only then does she let herself look at Ben.

He is wearing an expression she cannot decrypt. She wants to reach out and tug their bond, as of a lifeline; to stroke and coax and ask to be let in. It lands a cold blow when she recalls there is no bond between them, not here.

"I think it would behoove the padawans to see a demonstration."

Master Skywalker approaches, Tai following with his tenacious smile.

The Twi'lek girl steps, bowing, away from Ben and Rey.

Rey wonders what her master is about until she follows the arrow of his smile toward herself and Ben. Ben is already unclipping his lightsaber. His face is a schooled mask.

Rey panics. "That's -- no, I mean -- thank you, Master, but Master Solo doesn't need my help."

Luke's teasing challenge burns away her flimsy excuse before it is even off her lips. He needn’t point out the flat contradiction of her statement to her actions.

"You would be doing these padawans a good turn," Skywalker says, "to see the techniques up close, outside of raw battle."

"There is no emotion, there is peace," says Tai. "May peace continue to reign in the galaxy."

Master Skywalker makes a shooing motion. "Go on then."

No, no, no, no. Rey does _not_ want to fight Ben. She's fought with Ben enough for one lifetime.

She has no choice.

She pivots her body; faces him. She feels as though she moves in water; with resistance and a desperate need to keep her head up, to keep her lungs clear. Her hand moves to her lightsaber at her belt. With a flip it ignites.

This is not a real fight, she tells herself. We'll be playing. You won't hurt him. You won't hurt him, you won't hurt him.

Ben doesn't wait for a word from Master Skywalker. He strikes first. Rey doesn't parry but steps back with ease. It is a probing blow, neither too direct nor too eager: he is appraising her, getting to know her. Rey's body flushes hot. He swings, and she steps backward, stride after stride, keeping her elbow loose to block with as little movement as possible, never advancing.

Like a connoisseur, Ben samples her skill -- sips at it, licking his lips. When did she get a fever? She sees the moment he grows tired of her reticence. He pushes her. His next blow is a perilous one. They lock sabers, and Rey is transported back to the night on Starkiller. She heaves, shoving him off of her. Tightens her grip and uses her body to power her swing. Now she is the one advancing, and Ben retreats, blocking and dodging.

She makes an overhead strike and he glides in and up to meet it. He is under her, looking upward, as she looms over, her spine a curve, the warping music of the sabers mixing with their panted breaths. His lips quiver. "You're holding back."

He smells of salt and sun-warmed earth and crushed grass. Rey propels herself, using his lightsaber, and staggers backward. Before she can recalibrate, he thrusts toward her, and she slips. The veil over her power blows back; her power pulses, once, through the Force. Her saber meets his, the pressure of water breaking through a dam. Ben flies backward. He lands with a thud, back flat to the field.

" _BEN_!"

Rey drops her saber and runs to him.

He blinks. His eyes don't focus on her. She kneels over him, nearly straddling. Her hands accost him, roaming, feeling for broken bones, for open wounds. Even when she learns he is whole, her shaking hands go over him; his stomach, his shoulders, his chest, the trunk of his throat, again and again. He feels so good, so real. So _alive_. And she has hurt him! She is crying. She realises when a hot tear drips onto his face, and his eyes fly to her, seeing her at last. The whites of them shine like water in moonlight.

Her voice shudders. "I'm s-sorry, I'm s-so _sorry_."

She pries her hands away. Staggers to her feet and flees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, how much does Luke know? Just why is he letting Rey stick around? If @englishable didn't ask me these questions, we'd never know!!


	8. Chapter 8

Luke is too young to be an old man. Only nineteen years of age when R2-D2 came to him -- or rather, was sent, if not by Leia unintentionally, then by some cosmic stagemaster, pulling strings. Too far advanced in years to begin Jedi training, Master Yoda let him know. Impatient, reckless, attached.

Since Dagobah, he feels he has lived one hundred lifetimes: one lifetime for every lost friend in the Rebellion, and one hundred more for the loss of the father he almost-knew. Leia never really processed it. She shut Anakin Skywalker up in the cupboard of her memory and hoarded the key. When Ben was born, she made Luke and Han swear not to disclose it. She would tell him, in her own time. Twenty years later and she has yet to come through on that promise.

Ben was a sweet child, but he never slept well. Luke recalls how tired Leia was, looking after a fretful infant. Han tried his best to be supportive but he had no parental figures to fall back on. During those early years, Leia relied far too much on Luke. This was soon rectified, when Luke renewed his commitment to his vocation to re-found the Jedi order. The boy's sleep improved; Leia could see the light, and Han stepped in to pick up the slack. For a while, they were happy.

Ben was chaos incarnate. As a small child, his quick mind and curiosity led him into mischief. "He's an evil genius," Han said. "Gets it from his old man." This stage was soon surpassed with an early interest in book learning. This, he did not in fact get from his "old man." It bewildered Han to no end. 

The boy felt things in wholes, or not at all. Sometimes, he was an aesthete, sage as an old man, viewing the world through wizened eyes. At other times, his feelings swelled unchecked and treacherous as a toddler's. His changeability became a hazard. One could hardly know how he would respond to a stimulus; sometimes he burst into sobs, flinging himself into the arms of his mother; other times he dove into a rage. He could break objects twice his size from the other side of the room. And then there were the times he reacted not at all. This last was eeriest. When he was calm, it was as though he was far away. He had a listening look about him, as though he could tune into frequencies not accessible to the human ear.

If it hadn't been for Ben's keen interest in piloting, Han would have struggled to bond with his son. But oh, he was proud. He let Ben sneak away with him and Chewie aboard the Millennium Falcon from time to time and intercepted unauthorised attempts more often than that, before Leia put a stop to it. She was haunted by a vision of the future, one she had hoped to repel by giving up her Force training as a Jedi. But, as is the way with fear, the more she held it at arm's length, the closer it crept.

In the end, they packed the boy up and sent him to his uncle. "This is for the best," Leia spoke to Luke, squeezing his hand. "You know what our father was. I -- I can't let what happened to him happen to Ben."

They way she said _happened_. Like it was not a choice or a failure of his. Luke understood why she needed to frame it that way. Unlike Luke, she had not been witness to their father's parting bid for the side of Light.

"I'll keep an eye on him, Leia. I won't let him fall."

Luke looked at his twin sister with sorrow and wondered when the fight had gone out of her. She was young yet. Far too young to be so old.

***

The child Ben struggled to adjust. He complained of homesickness and bad dreams. He still had outbursts of tears and temper. Through gradual work, in meditation, breathing exercises, focus, and martial skill, Luke helped Ben get a handle on his internal chaos. It yet remained, roiling beneath the surface, but it was manageable. Luke kept Ben close. The low note of the Dark resonated in the boy, and he could not pinpoint the source of it.

Luke feared putting too much on Ben too soon. Perhaps he was overprotective. He didn't worry that Ben could be hurt, physically. On the brink of manhood, he was already Luke's equal in strength and prowess. No, he feared the soft, rotten places in Ben, where the Dark Side rooted like fungus in the vulnerable soil of the boy’s insecurity. Luke knew that the Dark was as much a part of the Force as the Light. As much as he wished he could amputate the decay, his nephew would surely not survive such a procedure. 

So Luke watched, and he waited.

***

When the young woman appeared, and for those few seconds, the unguarded Force in her sang so like his sister's, he wondered if this could be an answer. Balance was key. The Force was a scale ordering the cosmos. If it found itself leaning too far in either direction, it would seek to self-remedy. Ben was a lonely man in a world that could not understand him. But perhaps, if he could feel he was not alone... 

Luke’s resolve was shaken when Rey confronted Ben in the eating hall. Her reaction to him had been profound and alarming. His nephew was a reservoir of power, yes, and Force sensitives could overreact when coming into contact with the rawness of it. But this was more than that. This woman seemed to _know_ him. That was when Luke began to suspect a convergence, a key point, a joint in the scaffolding of the universe where important events merged. She said that Ben reminded her of someone she knew, who died. Did she come from a different plane wherein his nephew's life had ended? Was he in danger of that very thing now?

Luke understood, with the kind of understanding reached between people made of similar mettle, that Rey would not offer any more information before she was ready. But she was determined to be here. If he manoeuvred carefully, he could use that to his advantage.

Luke decided that the safest place to monitor this new development was under his watch. He appointed Voe -- eager to please, stalwart Voe -- to mind Rey. Then he bided his time.

***

Rey does not want to fight Ben. Which makes Ben eager to get on with it. When she is near he feels all he can do is hold his breath and dive in, letting the current take him until she goes away. Then he waits, static, until she draws him in again. 

She possesses a custom lightsaber; he knows she is a full-fledged Jedi. Ben feels sure that Master Skywalker would not pair them together if they are not well-matched. 

He strikes first; it is a moderate-level attack a Jedi of her age and caliber can deflect with ease. He wants to show her he is eager to engage her in this way. Look, he is worthy. He is more than just a name. It comes easily to him, to interact with her at the end of a lightsaber. 

Ben can see right away that she is of considerable skill, more than he first assumed. She anticipates his movements and evades them. He picks up pace. She is good. She is _very_ good.

Respect and resentment alternately beat in his blood. Ben has always been the strongest Force user in his orbit, all his life; it is disorienting to meet his equal. At the same time, he feels a thrill: he can edge a little bit further, play a little bit harder.

She is lovely to watch. There is a familiarity to the way she moves but it is altogether her own. He cannot anticipate her. Fighting with her like this, he feels the way he does when he shifts gears in an X-wing fighter: the moment between flight and lightspeed, when all that keeps the ship from falling from the sky is an arbitrary-seeming law of physics.

As they move, he senses her inhibition gathering her tight, like a drawstring. It frustrates him, and he tries to get her to fight in earnest; but she refuses, blocking his swings but not going on offence. Ben recalls the petulant child, spurning his Uncle Luke's lessons, making the same mistakes over and under and out. He lets the child lean into her. He smells her scent, of sun-warmed skin, the sweetness of apples mingling with fresh perspiration. "You're holding back."

It does the trick. The way lightning crackles a warning before landing, her Force powers flash and then burst into flare. 

It knocks him backward. Someone shrieks his name. Static crowds his brain, drifts over his vision. He struggles to inhale; the blow to his ribs has deflated his lungs. There is a low hum in his ears, and light and dark alternates. Hands travel over him and he is aware of someone as from the bottom of a well. Something hot and wet drips onto his cheek. The puzzle of shapes and colours slot into place. He looks into the face of a weeping Rey.

For the second time in the span of a minute, she batters the breath out of him. 

He does not think about the recent swell of Force and its sharp retreat. He does not even bother with the ache radiating from between his shoulder blades. All he knows is this woman -- this Jedi knight, with a Force aptitude to rival his own -- is _crying_ over him.

"I'm s-sorry, I'm s-so _sorry_."

I know, he thinks. I _know_.

Then she is gone from his line of vision, and her sobs, her gentle scent, the hazy gauze of her Force signature drifts away on the air.

Ben lies on the ground, breathing shallow. Overhead arches a lapis-blue sky. The tear, still warms, trickles down his cheek, crossing his skin like a scar.

Tai stands over, hand held out. Ben takes it, and is hauled to his feet.

"Steady," Tai says. "That was quite a fall."

"All right, everyone!" Luke claps his hands. "Enough standing around and gawking like a colony of porgs. Get back to it!"

Ben, still breathless, looks all around, but there is no sign of Rey.

Uncle Luke bends forward, picking up something from out of the grass. He holds it out to Ben.

***

Ben finds her sitting against the wall of the bathhouse, folded like a fan. Her thighs drawn flush against her torso, her face hidden in her arms folded over her knees. Her shoulders quake. 

She hears him approach, of course. Her eyes fly up to him, wild and sore. Her face swollen with tears. Ben's entire body is a vestigial limb he doesn't know what to do with. So he holds the saber out to her. She stares at it, then at him -- he has to look away -- then reaches out and takes it from him. He drops his arm to his side but stays.

She keeps herself in a neat package and handles the saber, from her right to left. For all her poise with the weapon, when she is not fighting she moves with a lack of self-consciousness Ben has tried to cultivate his entire life. The nervous passing of the saber continues, so he comes to the wall and sinks down next to her, leaving enough space between them for a broad-shouldered Gamorrean.

Rey crosses her arms again and sinks her chin into them, fresh tears veiling her eyes.

Ben finds some foliage undulating in the distance in immediate need of staring-at. "I'm not hurt," he says, quietly. "Are you?"

He hears a breathy whisper. "No. No."

They sit like this for a long time, neither moving nor speaking. The sound of their breathing rises and falls with the currents in the air. Ben leans his head back against the wall. The stone is warm from the sun. He closes his eyes. There is nothing: no imminent thunderclouds stewing on the horizon of his consciousness, no prising fingers trying to get at him. Only the mellow sunshine caressing his skin, and the playful breeze carrying the weight of blossoms and the promise of rain. He sinks into the liminal place between waking and sleep. He cannot be certain. But he thinks he feels the trace of lips on his hairline -- and then he wakes. The darkling sky pricks with stars, and the nocturnal insects plunge into vespers. Rey has gone.

Ben stands, brushes off his robes, looks around. Over the distance, he spies Tai, walking toward him with a wooden bowl -- no doubt, of Ben's dinner -- trailing steam like the tail of a comet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, readers! Commenters, you have no idea the power you have to shape the story! Thank you @englishable for midwifing this crazy story.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter uses implicit language and scenarios around Snoke that may be triggering for people re child predators. Please take care. <3

That night it rains. In the morning, it keeps raining. 

The others run from building to building, like ships trying to dodge a meteor shower. The younglings are sequestered to a barren outbuilding for lessons. Their rowdiness is magnified by the closed space. Any chance she gets, Rey goes out to the doorway and stands in the rain. She's never got used to it. And here, especially, it is so warm, so refreshing.

Ben didn't have to come to her after she heaved him violently to the ground. But she was glad. She'd been twisted up inside; the old fear of her inner darkness backing her into a corner. What was she _doing_ here? Was she making things worse? Should she go to Master Skywalker now and confess everything? Should she leave? Then he stood over and gave her back her lightsaber, and he wasn't afraid. He didn't hate her. And then, just when she thought his mercy couldn't stretch any further to accommodate her wretched self, he sat with her. They had never had this. The closest thing, perhaps, had been that night on Ahch-To, when he told her she wasn't alone. Even then a sense of urgency hung over them, casting all their interactions in the shade of stolen time. This was different. He was him, and she was her, and they just were. 

She held herself, afraid to break the fragile peace. When she dared a look at him, his head rested on the brick wall, his eyes closed, his breathing even. He slept. Rey daren't breath. She felt the way one does, when a butterfly unexpectedly lands on one’s shoulder.

Rey stayed as long as she could, but the sky darkened. She could see the others moving toward the hall for the evening meal. She stood and hesitated. Should she wake him? But his face was the surface of a tranquil lake and she couldn't bring herself to disturb him. She crouched very near. Put her lips to his brow. Then she left briskly, before she took his head in her arms and held it to her chest like a treasure.

Voe keeps calling for Rey, "What are you doing? What's so interesting out there?" Rey takes her admonishments in stride.

Rey doesn't try as hard to keep her eyes away from Ben now. When she sees him for the morning meal, she lets her glance linger. He catches her eyes and gives her a smile. She smiles back. Just a small one, then it is time to pull away again. Fleeting, fleeting. Now she stands in the doorway of the outbuilding, inching out into the rain, and it smells as though someone has opened a jar of possibilities. A Quarren passes by, who looks to relish the rain as much as she does. She puts her hands out and up, as if to say, isn't it marvellous? And Rey nods and grins, mirroring her gesture.

The rain lets up by the evening meal, but the land is drenched, so the students push away the tables in the hall, and evening meditation is held indoors. As there is no sun to face, they sit in a circle. Rey positions herself as best she can to steal a look now and then at Ben. She watches carefully. Watches for any signs of something troubling him.

***

For several days Ben and Rey manoeuvre around one other with hyper awareness, magnets that can't quite repel. On the third day, Rey decides she's not built for pining. Master Skywalker, as usual, is taking his evening meal alone or is otherwise occupied. Rey is aware she may be punished later and welcomes the risk. She stands, giving a pat on the head to each youngling on either side, lifts her plate and her cup, and crosses the hall. She wedges herself into an opening on the left side of Ben, and sits with a quality of finality that signals to the rest of the table that this is where she will be sitting now, thank you, no further questions.

Ben looks at her, of course, with the soulful uncertainty of a beast being led to slaughter. He _would_ be horrified, sitting next to a strange older woman. So Rey angles her chin high, takes a mouthful of rice and speaks messily, "Did you know you can bypass a compressor on a Corellian YT-1300f light freighter in a pinch?"

Sometimes you have to let the butterfly come to you. Other times, prudence requires you break out the net.

***

Rey doesn't know if Voe and Master Skywalker speak about it. All she gets from Voe is an upbraiding look, and the topic is never breached. Rey sits next to Ben (or a near as she can get) for all of the meals going forward.

***

Ben is drawn to Rey like he is drawn to flame. Her warmth consoles, but sometimes it makes him sweat. She has a nearness to her that belies physical proximity. Like she _knows_ him. But how can she? He chalks it up to his resemblance to her deceased. 

It was made clear to him on the day when she burst into tears that she feels profoundly connected to him via the person she's lost. It is refreshing not to be Ben-the-legacy, but Ben, the-person-who-is-like-another. He can imagine himself out of his oblique existence, being someone else. The kind of someone a kind-hearted woman would mourn and cry over. He wonders about this other. Was he a good man? Did he walk with authority or was he more the sort to follow orders? Was he diligent, was he loyal? Did he have dreams, ambitions? What did he mean to her? What did she mean to him? Ben cannot tell Rey to back off. He doesn't really want to. It's nice to be mistaken for someone he's not.

He likes that she doesn't ask him questions. She just talks, almost to herself. Observations about how the younglings get on, something she has read in the Jedi texts, the weather. She doesn't require an answer from him. After eating, she will coast along with him as they leave and hover around to say goodbye as if they have finished a normal conversation. He is always polite. What is it Tai says? Be polite and you'll never have to worry about someone getting to know you?

The others notice her attachment, and whisper when they believe neither one of them is looking. Ben's face burns to the tips of his ears. Hennix elbows him, but Tai shoos the Quarren away.

"She's in love with you," Tai confides, and the words run off of Ben like rain on a tarp.

"Not me," he says. "Someone else."

Tai shrugs and looks far away. "Even so. Be kind to her. You've no idea what it takes a person, to allow themselves that kind of vulnerability."

There are no more lightsaber duels. Master Skywalker doesn't push for them, and neither Ben nor Rey bring up what happened. Sometimes, Ben will come out to watch the younglings or give instruction. (Voe doesn't like that he's sticking his nose in her territory, but he ignores her.) They work well together. Ben catches the things Rey misses (her technique is a tad messy, motley, as though she's had to train herself), and she is harder where he is soft. You can do better, she tells them, and it doesn't feel like an admonishment but like an expression of faith. He steps back to watch her with them.

She takes to calling him by his personal name in the company of the others. He can't bring himself to correct her. She's taken ownership of him, in this way; he thinks maybe this is something she needs. "Look at that, Ben, look how he steps as though sliding tiles, without picking up his foot! It's good, isn't it?" Her face is a bright lamp. And: "Ben! Ben! Did you see the Dangroge Constellation on the western horizon last night?" It is of course "Master Solo" when she is speaking of him directly to the padawans. But the shrewder students notice, and one of the girls mocks with nasty intonation, " _Be-en_!"

Rey's face falters. It is subtle. He might have missed it but for the way her lips pinch and her brows twitch. She rallies; breaks back into a smile and carries on as though she is made of durasteel.

"Hey," Ben says, as the padawans pack away their training weapons and retrieve various shucked-off clothing. He tugs the front of his robe to straighten it. "Don't pay them any notice. They sniff out a weakness in you and they go for the throat."

She gives him an indirect look, from beneath the fringe of her lashes; and he realises what he's just insinuated. 

"Young people see a lot. More than we give them credit for." Adds, "I guess I _was_ getting a little too friendly."

He says, "I don't mind."

***

For so many days, Snoke is silent, elsewhere occupied. Ben wonders if there are others: other promising little boys and girls who can tap into his mental broadcast; other children he whispers to and spoils with their own exceptionalism. Now that he is older, perhaps Snoke is losing interest in him. The thought comes as both relief and regret. For so long, Snoke has been his most intimate friend: the one who truly knows him, when he cannot not speak his mind nor give his strength full reign. 

When Ben started to guess that not everyone had an invisible friend living inside his head, Snoke warned him not to betray their secret relationship. _They wouldn't understand_ , Snoke said. _They never understand you. It would only make things worse_. Ben was careful to guard the secret of Snoke's presence, but he was only a little boy; and like all little boys, the time came when he slipped. He can't remember how he brought up the topic, how he worded it. What he remembers is the way his mother acted. How she went quiet, too quiet, like the sound of wild space -- or perhaps the absence of it. He could see she struggled not to react. But her lack of it frightened him. That night, from outside his bedroom door, he heard the muffled voices of his mother and father. 3PO read his bedtime story a little louder, but Ben heard what he heard.

As soon as the house went silent, Snoke reared up like the head of a snake, colossal in his fury. _I told you never to tell_ , he hissed. _I will leave you. If you say anything ever again -- I will leave you forever_.

The next morning at breakfast, Ben’s mother asked him to explain what he meant about “the man in his head.” Ben lied. He said he'd only been talking about a storybook character. His mother pressed, and Ben offered vague and harmless answers. At last, his father said, “Leave the boy alone, would ya? You’ll worry him into a pulp!” Ben never mentioned Snoke again.

Ben finds a nest in the sun to sit and meditate. The insects hum, and the far-away pattern of human voices create a backdrop upon which to clear his mind. He goes to the nothing-place where things are quiet. Then Snoke finds him. 

He doesn't greet Ben the way he is accustomed. Rather, Snoke goes right for the sensitive, secret places. It is almost painful. Ben braces himself and tries to keep erect, keep composure. Snoke is looking for something, and he is not gentle. Ben wants to curse him and fling him away -- but how would he even begin to do that? He's never been without Snoke, and he is afraid of what he would be if he were left truly alone.

_What ... is it ... you're looking for?_ Ben grits his teeth.

Snoke pulls back, giving Ben some reprieve. _There has been a disturbance in the Force, a kind of echo._

_Oh?_

_I can't construe it. But then I recalled a surge of Force energy coming from your direction a few days back. Have you anything to do with this?_

_I ... I did lose my composure the other week, when sparring with a student. It was probably me you were feeling._

Snoke is silent. Ben doesn't like it. _What about that woman, that Jedi?_ he asks at last.

Ben gives a mental shake of his head. _There's nothing to tell. Just one of Luke's pet prodigies. Like all the rest._

Again, the cryptic silence. _Remember_ , says the voice. _Remember who has walked with you all the days of your life. Who has not resented you like your churlish uncle, or coddled you like your simpering mother,_ _or feared you,_ _as your father does that which he does not understand._

_How can I forget_? Ben ignores the flavor of scorn in his words and hopes Snoke does too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are over 150 kudos, 30 bookmarks, and thousands of hits! Thank you for reading and sharing. Thank you for your comments and feedback, my beta @englishable, and all the rest! I feel like we are from 1/3 to halfway done. I promise we will get there!


	10. Chapter 10

> _Gorau prinder, prinder geiriau._ The best shortage is a shortage of words -- Welsh proverb

The day before the Vakdue Comet is to appear in the night sky, the younglings are given a holiday. They retain the frame of their schedule, with meals and mediation, but are given free reign to play and organize themselves how they wish during the rest of the day. They are permitted to wear their tribal robes or special clothes from home, if they've brought them. Those that only have Jedi garb break out of uniform by stringing together berries and tiny holed pebbles, weaving crowns of wildflowers and putting them in their hair.

A little girl named Jira places a wreath of indigo blossoms on Rey's head, and Rey tugs her padawan braid, the way she used to do with Paige. Rey feels a giddiness rise in her like helium with all this freedom, so she takes the opportunity to retreat to the dormitory while it is empty and she is not needed for other tasks. Sitting on her low bed, she goes through her ragged pack. She takes out the holos she brought and turns them on, one by one. The first two are of little Paige, one a holofilm of her skipping and then turning and waving for the camera. The other is a still one, of her sandwiched between her parents in a family portrait. The others are older, spare treasures of Leia's bequeathed to Rey when she died. Two of them are of a young couple, whom Rey recognises as Han and Leia. Han kisses her cheek and Leia feigns inconvenience, before turning on the lamp of her smile. The third is of Luke and Leia -- they are so young! The final three are of Ben. Two of a young boy, all chaos and a grin sewn with trouble. In the final holo, he is older. Subdued. His haunted eyes look out from the holo as through her, like a vampire in a glass.

A clatter and a shout startle her, and she switches off the holos and shoves them away, as two little girls run into the hall and to their shelves to retrieve their own treasures.

***

The day culminates in an informal feast, around a bonfire under the stars. They roast nuts, brestel nuts and tashru, on the coals and brandish red-hot sticks, before they are confiscated (the sticks, not the nuts). The elders tell stories with their hands tucked into their sleeves likes sages, and the padawans put out their mats and lie with their backs on the ground, to watch the tracking of the blue-tailed comet across the star-peppered sky. Even Master Skywalker shirks Jedi rigidity to show the children how the sand people used to dance after a successful raid on Tatooine. But all good things come to an end, and before the moons reach their zenith, the younglings are ushered to bed, with the intention of letting them sleep through the first hours of daylight, but then -- back to routine!

Rey is deep asleep when someone creeps to her bedside and shakes her awake. It is dark but she recognises the exotic nose and square hairline of a young Jedi named Leera. She whispers roughly to Rey that they are to meet at the darkened ashes of the evening's bonfire, under the comet-light, and to bring Voe.

"Voe?"

"Shhh ... she'll have to come if you say you are. And if she has to come, then she won't tell on us."

"I'll wake her, but I should stay. Someone should stay with the children."

"... Ben will be there."

***

Rey wonders if she ought to have come. She's a good five to ten years older than these junior Jedi, and even if she were of the intrepid age, a girlhood of relentless labour and near-constant hunger under the harsh suns of Jakku ruined any desire for juvenile rebellion.

There are about eight of them, and they've stirred up the embers of the night's bonfire, passing around a green-glass bottle. Jedi are not supposed to drink, but -- neither are they supposed to eat meat, and Rey knows that in the days of the Old Republic those rules were treated like glorified suggestions. That's when she spies Ben. Hanging back just outside the halo of warm flame-light, with a look on his face that matches her inner apprehension. He sees her, and their eyes meet in mutual misery. Rey walks up to him, swings to face the fire, and they sulk next to each other, until someone hands them the bottle.

"Come on, Solo, loosen up a little." Hennix knocks him on the arm.

Ben takes the bottle moodily and passes it to Rey.

Rey wafts the open nozzle beneath her nose and cringes. She braces herself and takes a swig. Lava burns down her throat, and she chokes and sputters.

"Terrible, isn't it?" Ben takes the bottle back and hands it to Hennix. "Mandalorian kri'gee."

Rey's hoarse voice just squeezes past her windpipe. "Horrible."

With the orbiting of the bottle, the small gathering of Jedi knights rises from frantic whispers to giggles and jeers. Watching the faces in the red cast of flames, Rey starts to put together why they would keep such a ritual. Despite the formal communal life of the Jedi academy and their work across the galaxy, there is a certain type of camaraderie that only germinates in the fertile ground of breaking rules together.

She seats herself next to Ben, like usual, and the young people, grown brave with alcohol, tease affably.

"Rey Nobody and Ben-the-Skywalker-heir-Solo. Huh."

"Just where do you come from, Rey?" a short man named Belz asks. His purple eyes burn scarlet in the firelight.

"Nowhere," Rey says. The part of her facing outward, away from the fire, grows cold. "I'm nobody."

"Are you sure?" Voe's eyes flash in the dual light, blue for comet, red for flame. "Are you sure you're not a secret princess, a fugitive from an extinct dynasty?"

Rey swallows an acerbic reply. Voe can't know how close to the truth she is is. She is only being Voe. She is young, and drink makes her loose-lipped.

Leera, tall and slim, places her arm on Voe's shoulder and sinks her weight into her. Voe tolerates this with crossed arms. Leer says, "You're really good with a saber, Rey. How did you learn technique like that? It's so ... I don't know ... darting and twirling."

"Ben does the twirling thing, too," Tai says, taking a prolonged gulp from the bottle. "What? You _do_!"

Rey wants the conversation steered away from her. What did ordinary people do when they wanted to have a good time? "Does anybody know any drinking games?"

"Let's play spin the lightsaber!"

There is a cocktail of groans and cheers, but the group rearranges itself into a circle on the side of the campfire, incorporating Ben and Rey on the outer edge. Someone procures a saber, and it is handed to the middle of the ring.

"We need to scoot in closer," assess Hennix. Ben and Rey don't move, forcing the others to tighten the ring at their link.

"This is childish," Ben says.

"What is it?" asks Rey.

"You've never played spin the lightsaber?" says Belz. "You _are_ an oddity!"

They don't explain; they play. And Rey gathers the terms of the game like too much kri'gee going to her head, making her nauseous. She does not wish to be kissed, by anyone, other than... Her cheeks, already flush from the fireside, heighten in colour. She is glad for the distortion of flickering light and dark. She is the oldest person here, and she’s as flustered as a handmaiden.

The saber lands on her, and a fidgeting Bothan tries to approach, but Rey levels him with her Master glare and mutters, "Don't even try it." He laughs a little too loudly, rubbing his neck, and backs off.

The others' complaints last no more than a few moments before they've moved on.

Two more spins. Two more kisses. Belz gets to kiss Voe, and Voe gets to kiss Tai.

A third spin of the saber and it lands, hilt-facing Ben. Another human (Rey thinks his name is Jek) cackles and rocks forward. "Come on, Mr. Frigid, let's see it."

Rey watches, as though her body is strung up on a line, taut and primed to snap. The tall Leera is of a long-necked, indeterminate species, and her wide-apart eyes glow beneath the square hairline. She approaches Ben, who neither moves away nor toward her. He is very tall, but so is she, and with her standing, he has to recline his face to look into hers. She plants a kiss on his mouth like she is setting down something disagreeable. Ben frowns. Rey feels cold and heat prickling beneath her skin.

"Oh, come on," someone yells, "you can do better than that. Again! Again!"

Leera rolls her eyes, but she descends on his mouth a second time, only now with feeling, and Ben's mouth becomes pliable beneath hers. Three seconds, four seconds, five ...

Rey's arm darts out, snake-violent, of its own volition. She pushes the lissom Leera away. Eyes narrow, nostrils flare. "That's enough."

The group makes a communal sound of disappointment. Rey is aware only of a painful pulse inside her head. It must be the alcohol.

Leera, lips trembling, skims her eyes over Rey, desperate to gain her footing. "What do you know about it? He's not yours."

Rey jumps to her feet, startling her tall rival a step backward. She fingers the lightsaber at her belt.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Tai has sprung toward the two women, moving his arms in placating motions. "Let's just everyone calm down."

Rey casts her gaze to the earth, trying to find the thread of reason in the tangle of incendiary feelings -- before she trips over the ever-present knot that is Ben -- and when she glances over her shoulder to gauge the damage, he has gone. Her heart flutters up to her throat, like a bird up a flue. She doesn't wait for further dialogue. She follows after.

He stalks like the giant he is in the dew-wet grass under tremulous comet-light, like a fringe of neon rain.

"Ben!" She considers sprinting ahead to cut him off, but he makes an about-heel to meet her head-on. The moonlight mixing with the blue of the comet casts his face like marble.

"She's right, you know. I'm not _yours_. I don't care how much I look like him, or remind you of him. I don't _belong_ to anyone."

Rey feels she has cried enough for several lifetimes; just when she thinks she's exhausted all excess moisture in her body, tears sting anew. "I know," she says. Her voice drifts up to him on the still air. "I know. I'm sorry."

The rage bleeds from him, as though she has opened a vein. "Don't -- don't _cry_."

Rey bites her lip and tries to throw up a water-proof barrier. It is not fair to manipulate him with tears.

She stoops underneath the weight of everything she wants to say to him: that she loves him and doesn't even care if he loves her back (though that is not strictly true), only that he is safe and happy; that she doesn't wish to infantilize him but to give him agency, the way he always, always gave it to her, even when they stood at opposite ends of a war; that she will corral all the demons that taunt and trail him, the material and immaterial, the weak and the strong, and place the sword of exorcism into his hand. More than anything, in that moment, she wants to pull his body around hers, assuring herself he is solid and living, the muscles knitting together the terrible landscape of his body, in all its animal-glory. She steps forward, her eyes skittering over him and up to his mouth the way they did on the elevator when he brought her to his malignant master, and she told him she saw his future and believed in him. She had to believe in him, though she didn't know why at the time, that he was more her self than she was. 

His mouth -- that large, soft thing, an instrument of torture that could make or break her, like the jaw of a lion, so tender and so violent.

She takes another step toward him, and he steps back. She stops. He doesn't want this, he doesn't want _her_. What kind of monstrous chasm of yawning need is she?

"You're not," she says quietly. "You're not ... _just_ him. You're you. You're so very _you_."

She can see his eyes looking for somewhere to land in the milk-lit night. "The thing is ... I don't -- I don't -- _know_ that I want to be ... me." His voice cracks on the last word, like a twig in thaw.

Her voice trembles, low, imitating the crack in his own. "Don't say that." She steps toward him again, and he does not draw away. "Please don't ever say that."

"And maybe I ... _like_ ... that in your eyes I can be him. That's not exactly fair to you, either."

Rey crosses the last few steps toward him, placing herself in creeping increments inside his zone of autonomy, giving him time to pull away. When they are almost chest-to chest, she turns her head and sets her ear against him into the curve of his throat -- like a mechanic in the deep, still listening before the diagnosis of a broken thing. She raises her arms and they come around him, and her whole body vibrates to be so near. If the bond were live it would lap into an inferno and consume the rest. But it is not; she can only rely on her base senses to alert her to what is going on inside him, to be wary of his comfort. By the time her hands clasp her wrists at his back, he has sunk his face into the top of her head. 

She shifts, settling against him; gyres slow circles with the heel of her palm into the curve of his spine; and he lets her hold him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you @englishable for suggesting questions that helped me finish this chapter!


	11. Chapter 11

> _Benthyg dros amser byr yw popeth a geir yn y byd hwn._ Everything you have in this world is just borrowed for a short time. -- Welsh proverb

For a little while Ben stood and let her comfort him and everything was quiet, inside and out. It was like the time he'd sat next to her, after she threw him to the ground with an upsurge of power, and his mind cleared like a sky after a storm, washed clean and thin and brittle. The only other times he ever felt that sky-deep stillness was in sleep, during his desert dreams. The ones where he slipped out onto the sand and gazed up into the jewel-dark night, waiting, he is not sure, but he thinks, for someone to come back to him. 

Last night, he felt big. Much bigger than her, but somehow she didn't make him feel ungainly and out of place. Her head was just the right height for resting his own. She smelled like the frayed embers of a dying star and a thousand lifetimes under a thousand suns, and -- God, he was going to start bleeding poetry, now? He didn't even know her. Except for the fact that she was remarkably Force-trained, a bit reckless with her forms but elegant with her saber; that she ate every meal like it could be her last, uncouth and unapologetic and with such relish that she made the food taste better just by watching her (which once and for all refuted 3PO’s many-layered argument that using the proper utensils would make a meal much more enjoyable); that you could tell a real smile from a fake one by her dimple; that she talked much too openly in his guarded presence, like she was trying to catch up for not having shadowed him all his life.

He startled at the bend of foot on fronds and swept away, further into the woods. He didn't look back, didn't want to be pulled to her by the lovely temptation to be who she wanted him to be. It was late, and he wanted to dream.

***

Rey is not at the morning meal, but at midday she doesn't sit directly next to him. His relief is swift and draining, quickly replaced by a tactile loss. She's realised the truth, that he's nobody, not really. Snoke slides in even as the thought comforts and paralyses him, murmuring his awful comforts and his kind lies.

_When you are ready to come to me, my boy, I'll be waiting_.

***

Rey wakes in the morning with a throb the size of a Star Destroyer in her head. She doesn't think she drank all that much, but the Mandalorian alcohol must be mean and dirty. She pushes up off her stomach and wobbles to sit. Pinches the bridge of her nose, to ward off nausea. 

The night returns in a flood of colour and feeling: the orange flames licking her face, and the red-hot surge of jealousy when Leera kissed Ben; the way she'd run after him green with sickness, and the way he'd let her hold him all burnished gold and the light of sunset on the ocean. She had him. For a little while, she had him. And jealous time contracted until it was nothing but a hiccup in the history of the imperfect universe.

A sound alerted them to someone’s approach, the shift of soil and brush of frond. Ben startled out her arms and into the night-quiet trees. Rey felt the absence of him like the absence of light in a black hole.

Voe, with her mix of authority and disinterest, said, "Where've you been? It's time to go back now."

The little girls rise one by one, but Rey likes back down and lingers in her bed, trying to even her breathing, trying to air out the painful static behind her nose and eyes. The next thing she knows, Voe is tapping her on the shoulder, saying, "You missed the first meal of the day. What's wrong with you?"

Rey groans.

Voe sighs. "I know what you need. Come on."

***

The bath house has two entrances, on either side, one for men and one for women. Not all sentients have the distinction, but enough peoples are conservative of tribe and tradition to give the option of separation in the public places. The diversity of Master Skywalker's academy is fine indeed. There are Twi'lek and Togruta, and all manner of human beings -- in every shape and colour, like wildflowers. 

Voe and Rey enter the side for women. The side shelves are stocked with towels and single serving lumps of rustic soap (no doubt made at the academy), and there are pipes lining the walls, feeding faucets fitted with levers. The technology is old and ingenious. By pumping a lever hard for several seconds, power is generated, enough to set the water boiling and running for five minutes, long enough for bathers to get a thorough, if brisk wash. The segregated washrooms connect with a large central bath, shared by the sexes. Rey and Voe will not have the luxury of a soak this morning.

Rey strips, hangs her clothes on a hook in an alcove, and takes the pump next to and one over from Voe, who is already scrubbing vigorously. They are the only two washing this morning, as the girls of her dormitory have scheduled bath times and the other Jedi women bathe earlier or later in the day. Rey pumps the lever, and steaming water pours forth. It is a welcome balm to her skin. She lathers her lump of soap and gets to work. Already, she feels the freshness of the water loosening the knot in her skull.

Voe speaks into the soap-film silence. "You know, I've known Ben since we were ten years old. We're not required to follow the old ways anymore, but I think, in his way, he's more pious than Master Skywalker..." She slides her eyes over to Rey without moving her head. "Do you see what I'm saying?"

It is an intimate conversation in an intimate location, and Rey doesn't know how she feels about opening up to Voe. Everything is jumbled up with the want and the fear and the blistering, fleeting contentment. She says, "Yes. I think so."

Voe massages a lather into her shoulder. "He seems to like you. But you're a woman, an older woman, and I don't think Ben's ever ... matured in that way."

Rey is tired of leapfrogging around her feelings. "You mean sex?"

Voe's head darts to her, her eyes narrow. But there is a new cast of respect to her glare. "Yes. I mean sex."

"I'm not trying to sleep with him."

The corner of Voe's mouth catches on a snarl. "Yeah. No. You just don't want anyone else to."

Rey is silent. The comment slides into place like a knife in her ribs.

"I mean, I think he's an awkward giant, but other people show interest in him from time to time. He never seems to cop on to their attraction. It's like he was brought here when he was ten and his growth stalled."

"What was he like? Then? Please tell me."

For a moment, Voe looks distinctly uncomfortable -- Rey cannot say why. "He was a wreck, to be honest. I didn't understand it. It was such an honour to be here, I had to fight to let my parents send me. And then it felt like, he didn't even have to try, didn't want to, and he was perfect, better than everyone." 

Voe doesn't have to say that she hated him. Rey knows. Rey knows what it feels like to hate Ben with a kind of helpless devotion. It is impossible for him to solicit feelings of apathy from anyone.

Rey watches her as she finishes her bathing, as rough with her own body as she is with others. She lets the words drift over casually, so that Voe needn’t answer or even acknowledge. “For what it’s worth, I think you are a naturally gifted Jedi.”

Voe might have made a small noise in her throat, but it’s covered by the sound of splashing. She finishes first, already braided and half-way dressed when Rey's water trickles and subsides. Rey considers pumping the lever again, but Voe is impatient to go.

***

Rey migrates toward him with the steady inevitability of the changing phases of a moon. She is so, so careful with him. Careful not to look too hard or too long, to crowd his space, to invade his privacy, or to cut him off without a tether to her, should he need to yank her back. When he doesn't say anything either way, about her coming or going, nearer or farer, she settles back into orbit around him.

During chores one morning, Ben puts his head through the door of the kitchens where Voe and Rey are shelling a kind of blue and oblong pea. He is stripped of his outer robes, exposing porcelain, mole-scattered shoulders and bare arms. 

“You’re not clean, stay out of the kitchen,” someone scolds.

He adjusts his body so that half of him leans in and the other half remains outside. “Voe. I need Rey's help." 

Voe throws him an ill-tempered look and then waves Rey away, who tries to wrestle her lips against her fool-smile.

"What do you need help with?" she asks, as soon as they have stepped over the threshold into the open light and beyond hearing of Voe.

"Nothing, really," Ben says. "I just wanted to inconvenience Voe and give you an out if you wanted it."

Rey's smile is victor. He's _rescued_ her.

"Well, I'll help you," she says. "Where are you off to?"

"I'm working in the garden today."

Rey is already rolling up her sleeves.

***

Earth is a very different thing from sand, though they are made of the same primordial atoms. The one is soft and life-giving, the other coarse and sterile. Rey likes to put her hands into the dark soil and feel the tendrils of Force life curl. 

They are transplanting seedlings, which is a delicate endeavour. The move from the greenhouse to the wild frontier that is the garden is fraught with danger. Any number of things could happen: roots could get damaged, the plant could fail to take hold. The soil could reject it, or the plantling reject the soil. The finger-sprawled seedling Rey places in the ground with the spade of her hands is a species of grain that grows quickly and produces a large crop: if it thrives, it will feed the academy for many cycles.

Rey looks up from her work across her row of embryonic plants to where Ben works at a similar task. She notices a smudge of dirt on his left cheek, and she laughs.

His eyes start up to her. "What?"

"You've just got a -- a -- " she gestures toward her face.

He catches on and leans back, his dipped brows a gentle rebuke. "You should see your own face."

Rey's heart slumps. She's no idea what she looks like, and she wishes she’d taken more care to be lovely for him; but now that he's mentioned it, she tends to use her arms to wipe at her face when she works, and she can picture what a mess she must be. She can feel the perspiration collecting along her hairline and behind her neck. She’s sure her clothes must be obscene. She heats under his inscrutable evaluation -- but then he gives the soil a pat, stands, and gestures her to follow.

***

He leads her into the yellow-seeped jungle; stepping with the step only a giant creature can cultivate -- overcompensating for his heaviness with a measured tension, holding back his imprint on the earth as though a held breath. Rey doesn’t know why he brings her to the clearing of his cool lake, says, "It's the perfect temperature all-year round," and begins to remove the final layer of his robes.

Rey panics. She swerves away from him with her blood pounding in her ears, recalling too sharply the one other time he'd gone bare of chest before her. She waits until she hears the lapping of water to know that he has submerged. Then starts to take off the outer layer of her own clothing. It is a mercy to wedge off the close-toed boots. She leaves her breast band and under trousers on, turns, and runs wading into the water before she can second-guess herself. Ben is swimming in large strokes, his powerful limbs skimming through the water, the liquorice-black locks damp on his nape. When he gets to center he windmills his arms to face him toward her. By now she is pretty far in the water herself, up to her shoulders. The shock of it tapers off into a cool comfort.

She steps into a sinking, muddy spot and flails, falling over into deeper water. A desperate, adrenaline-driven ride through waves toward the wreckage of a weapon of mass destruction and twelve subsequent years of living on an island has not removed the preservation instinct around large bodies of water. Her splashes grow increasingly desperate, so that Ben darts toward her in the water and grabs her forearms; she doesn't like that he has limited her movement and grabs him back to reassert control.

"Easy. You don't like the water? You didn't have to come in if you didn't want to."

Rey is thoroughly put out. "I like the water," she says. Why must she argue over a point so clearly against her favour? 

Because it's easier than saying the truth, which is, I like _you_.

"Keep kicking and you'll be able to tread," Ben says.

She does, and he loosens his grip on her arms, letting them drift away. She holds onto him still. "Don't let me go!"

"You've got it."

Rey shakes her head. "No. No."

"There, see?" Not ungently, he twists his wrists around to free himself from her white-knuckled grasp. "You're doing it."

Rey yelps, a sound that comes from a place of subterranean fear. She plunges in and out, now bobbing up, now sinking, guttering and swallowing water, arms reaching out to him. "Ben!"

He clasps her arms again, and she pulls herself toward his radiating heat. She doesn't know what is the water choking her and what is sobs, but her limbs reach for him of their own accord and wrap around his body, so that he holds her like a small child.

"It's okay, I've got you."

She's pawing him like a small mammal, trying to climb a tree out of the way of danger.

"R-Rey!" He sputters as she shoves his head underwater, and the momentum steers him to the bottom, where he plants his feet and thrusts upward so that he breaks the surface like a shaggy-headed, eagle-nosed fish. He grabs her on his way up and kicks, projecting them toward the shallows.

When he brings her to where she can stand, Rey sloshes toward shore and climbs, looking for all the world like a drowned sand-rat. She falls back with her arms and leg splayed in the swampy soil and breathes.

***

They are soaking wet and bedraggled, their arms full of half-damp clothing, and they take the long way around in the jungle to get back to the huts. Ben says he has some dry, clean clothes they can put on, and no one will be any the wiser.

She is uncharacteristically quiet, and Ben takes it she is cross with him. He ought to feel sorry, and he does, but -- part of him, the part that knows they were never in any danger, finds her funny. This burning furnace of fury with a lightsaber is reduced to an adorable marsupial when wet.

At last she says, "Does anyone else know of that place?"

"I'm not sure. It's not very far, but the jungle is full of little pools and caves and hollowed-out trunks, plenty to go around. I've never seen anyone there, and I've been swimming since I was a kid."

"You do that for _fun_?"

He can’t help it. He laughs, throwing a look back at her over his shoulder. He doesn't miss the way she seizes up and stalks ahead with a funny, joint-locked gait. He clears his throat of the ever-cloying guilt.

They enter his one-room hut, with its sparse but attractive furnishing -- the low desk where he keeps his calligraphy things, the futon across from there, a stack of neatly lined books and bundled scrolls, a half-taken apart training droid, and some plants by the opening that serves as a window. The huts here are designed to keep cool in the jungle sun, but the light punches through here, making little sun-pools like pockets of warmth. Rey gravitates toward one of these. She is a creature of the light, that one.

Ben goes to his trunk and rummages. He finds some old clothing from when he was a teenager shoved down toward the bottom, a better fit for Rey. He hands them to her, but her attention is split by the plain interest with which she regards his accommodation.

She takes the clothes offered her. She holds them to her chest, as though cradling a baby, and walks to his desk, looking over the various trinkets and tools. On a ledge over the desk rests a collection of useless objects: shells, thumbprint leaves, a needle blossom he brought back from Kashyyyk after a mission with Uncle Luke, some bark in the shape of supplicating hands. They are arranged according to colour, shape, and size. Rey’s hand goes out to trace each belonging in turn, as though they are artefacts or sacred instruments.

Ben feels the familiar pinch of being too seen. "It's just ... a hobby."

She fingers a page on the desk smudged with poetry, and he feels his face heat. But he says nothing as she holds it in her two hands, reading. She takes the paper, smooths out its wrinkles, and tucks it in among his altar treasures, as if it belongs there.

Rey turns her back to him and sidles into the shirt, which is long enough to cover her sufficiently so she can remove the damp trousers and replace them with his baggy hand-me-down. She closes her belt around her waist and adjusts her saber. She smooths her hands over the clothes and looks down at herself, and Ben wonders what she is thinking. But then he takes the cue to dress himself and turns around to give her the same courtesy. They stand like that for longer than necessary, backs to one another, each giving ample time to regain composure. Then they rotate, twin planets around a shared star.

"Sorry I almost drowned you," he says, quiet.

She shrugs. "You'll have to teach me.” And he knows this is her way of forgiving him, reasserting her trust.

She looks down, and her long-lashed eyes flutter back to the treasure-altar and the poem.

"Keep it," he says, on an impulse.

Her eyes fly to him, shimmering. "Really?"

He crosses to where she has set the paper, slides it from beneath its pebble-weight, and holds it out to her.

She takes it as though he has just plucked an apple from an orchard of stars.

"Thank you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A longer-than-usual chapter to make up for slowing down. I had a nice time unlocking englishable's secret tropes. ;) Hope ya'll like them too!


	12. Chapter 12

That night Rey lies wrapped in the mended, oversized black sweater, thinking about the contrasting clothes she has folded with the poem-page flat between them and tucked beneath her pillow next to her lightsaber. She hopes no girl saw her place them there, child though she may be. Children ask questions. And what is Rey to say? I don't want the smell of him to leave, like it has this sweater I wear? 

She tucks her nose beneath its collar. The smell of him, so potent and necessary in the years of her service, fades to nothing in his frank presence. Tears prickle in her eyes. It was that smell that brought him back to her, if only memory. The flicker of the bond opening, and the subtle change settling into her olfactory senses. She didn't know it as it happened. It was only later, when she breathed in through the fabric and let it soak up her tears, that his smell brought her back to those proto-lovers' quarrels.

When he laughed -- God, when he _laughed_! -- such a heat rolled through her she almost seized up. Rey knew she was a sexual being but she'd never felt it so potently as when he laughed at her on the jungle path. The mixture of antagonism and attraction got into all her corners and crevices, and desert-raised Rey had to wrangle the impulse to tackle and pelt him. She _would_ revert to the tactics of a nine-year-old boy tormenting the girl he's sweet on. And their physical altercation was but two turns from a wrangling of an altogether different sort.

If she closes her eyes and pretends the sweater is him, lets the smell of his borrowed clothing open and close around her, she can imagine she is in his arms ... _no_! She has no right to think of him in this way, without his consent. And he is not _her_ Ben -- not the Ben who offered her the galaxy like an engagement ring. Cold lead drops, weighing her. Is this -- is this _wrong_? To be having feelings for young Ben Solo that ought to belong to the split-faced Kylo Ren? Is she forgetting the collected fragments of his humanity, which he couldn't throw away; the wounds, some self-inflicted, that pit the landscape of his body as sure as his scars; does she reject him with this new portrait, replacing him in the shrine of her heart? Letting their rare moments be overshadowed by the sun-strong, baby-colt beauty of Ben the Jedi? Is she an unfaithful wretch? She jerks her head into her pillow and stifles her crying.

Rey wakes with a head full of dull sawing in the morning. She considers taking Ben's loaned clothes to the laundry but makes no move to do so and finds she has made the bed around them so it is too late anyway. Worry shadows her throughout the day. If there are two Bens are there not two Reys? What of the straggled little girl in the Jakku desert? Is she harming her by being here? She would be an adolescent, navigating her body changes alone, the start and halt of them as nutrition came when it would. What obligation does one have to a past self? And if she were brought face-to-face with the little girl she had been, could she do nothing?

But what would it comfort the child to know who she was -- that she was the product of a clone, and that her parents, in their misguided desperation, sold her and left her a slave, only to die and abandon her? 

Rey is tempted to go to Luke; to open the truth like a vein and let it bleed out before him. He would know what to do ... wouldn't he? Then the shared-image of their beloved master lunging over her-Ben-self in the dark of the hut stays her hand.

She wakes with headaches more days than she doesn’t.

***

Swimming lessons commence at odd times; they pass each other, along with words, during their working day or else confer in vague talk between bites of rice and stewed greens. When an opportunity arises that is suitable for both, they meet at the lake. Ben provides their change of clothes, as Rey has very little belongings. It is at this point that she switches out her previously borrowed outfit so that he can bring them to be laundered without anyone catching on -- unless either one of them have laundry chores coming up the following day, in which case they wash them themselves. They are at liberty, as full Jedi, to use their recreation time as they wish. But whether by inclination to keep private things private, or to avoid the inevitable teasing, they keep their meetings clandestine.

Rey's feelings toward water are mixed. While she luxuriated in the abundance of it, she'll never quite be at home with it the way she is on solid land.

Her feelings towards Ben's touches are less convoluted. It is enough to suffer the humiliation and fear if it shepherds his hands toward her.

Ben is patient with her, not at all the battle-heightened prince who rebuked her for still holding on, urged her to _let go_. But then, he'd been steady and faithful chasing her across the galaxy after. It was Rey who'd lashed out. She is older now, and thousands of days of meditation have brought her faults to the forefront, to be kneaded into submission. She gets frustrated with his instruction but reels herself back from lashing out. On the fourth lesson, he lets her go in the middle of the lake and she treads water. He drifts away from her, and she pants and flaps toward him. Each time she gets closer, he moves a little further away. This goes on for two minutes until she starts to cry, and though he is bewildered, she can't very well say that it is too much their story, drawing toward and apart from each other until the end of all things.

***

They sit on the shore, drying, with the birds calling high in the trees and the distant roar of water from some hidden falls further in. They don't speak much. It is like they are a painting, subjects and voyeurs both.

Rey rubs her arms and looks askance at him. "How are you?"

He stares down at the waterline. An insect dances on the surface tension, oblivious to its mortal danger. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, how are you doing?"

That captures him. He turns his head toward her but doesn't quite meet her eyes. After a pause he says, "I don't know."

She shifts, moving closer, but keeps the body-wide space between them. "Don't you?"

He squints out over the lake, wondering what he should say to that. The truth shoulders its way through all the other possible answers. "No one's really asked me before."

Rey moves another inch closer. "Are you happy?"

That strikes him as an odd question. Is he where he ought to be? Is he doing the right thing? Is he making use of those gifts as is required of him? Those are questions he understands.

When he doesn't answer, she says, "If there's anything ... troubling you ... you know, I'm happy to listen."

He grabs a reed and stabs it between a pair of pebbles. What if he opened up to her? What would it feel like, to take the lid off the boiling pressure in his skull? Snoke would punish him for it, he has no doubt. He could bear that. It's Rey's reaction that worries him. What if she takes herself away, with her soothing presence and her sparkplug smile?

Her nearness accosts him out of nowhere, like a rogue asteroid. He's been touching her, marginally, while teaching her how to swim, and it's never bothered him, not the way touching other people does. It comes naturally. But he now grows aware, in more than an academic way, that she has a body, a body that takes up space in a way his does not, a body that is not his body; that they exist in two but could close the distance with a touch, skin to skin. It is not the way he felt when she held him the night of the comet. That was settling, a grounding phenomenon. This makes his pulse climb and his skin twitch.

So he makes a choice. Ben scoots his hand toward hers, until they're almost touching. Keeping his eyes straight ahead of him, he slides his fingers over and through hers. And when she turns her hand around to give him her palm, the heat ignited in his chest plummets low, and it is not altogether unpleasant. 

They sit, apart but together, connected by the sensitive instruments of their hands, until the shadows scurry into the undergrowth and the evening insects tune their strings.

***

Of course Luke knows of the comet-night rendezvous. It happens so infrequently, he is willing to look the other way. Rigidity in the Jedi order of the past bred rebellion. The Jedi -- of his pedigree in particular -- played hard and fast with the rules. They were good Jedi, it was true, but where had it got them? Qui-Gon died an early death trying to hail the chosen one. Obi-Wan and Yoda went into exile after the fall of the very same. Even Anakin Skywalker's padawan abandoned the order, after she saw the corruption for what it was. And well she should have, if it meant going the way of her master.

Luke wants to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors. Resurrecting a near-extinct order poses its challenges. If sometimes he is too harsh or too soft, he hopes the universe will forgive him, and trusts the Force to balance things out as they should.

The more he watches Ben and Rey, the more he suspects it is just that. They have an oscillating effect on one another: while one is strong, the other is soft; one active, the other quiet and subdued. When Ben is around her, he is either agitated or at peace -- but not brooding. It is clear to Luke, as to everyone, except possibly the boy himself, that Rey is devoted; she takes his side in petty quarrels and goes out of her way to aid him when he is not aware; and Luke suspects it is Ben she had been asking after, that first day in the sun-soaked hut, before he saw and was shocked by her reaction to him. If Rey had been sent to harm, she caused the opposite effect. Luke allowed his vanity, briefly, to suggest to him perhaps he himself had sent her their way. It was the kind of thing he would do -- find a lost soul and rehabilitate it.

He is more like his predecessors than he cares to admit.

Even as things carry on normally at the academy, Luke is troubled by growing unrest in other parts of the galaxy. He tries to keep the young ones as disconnected from the outer world as possible -- they need complete formation, to grow roots for holding firm during the trials to come, before he feels confident in exposing them to the nuances of conflict. For them, the Force is still a simple thing, a Light side and a Dark. Knowing that it isn’t precisely so -- that isn’t the kind of thing that can be _taught_. When it comes to Ben, he is not even comfortable to allow him that. Luke chooses Ben to accompany him, putting it out as though he requires his expertise and skill; really, he wishes to keep his nephew close under his supervision.

Luke wonders if Ben will bring up Rey again, but he seems to want to keep her and whatever thoughts he has regarding her to himself. Which suits Luke, as he is occupied with other things. His twin sister decided to run for office in the Galactic Senate. He worries about the implications of this on the entire family; privacy is a commodity, a currency in which politicians buy and sell. For Ben, more than himself, Luke fears being thrust, even tangentially, into public scrutiny.

The day Candidate Leia Organa's lineage is made public, everything changes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are getting there, folks! Thank you englishable for catching my tense confusion. Also, for bringing up a few chapters ago that the Jedi don't seem very good at following rules!


	13. Chapter 13

Ben's feelings toward Rey are changing -- not the species of them into an alien one; rather, from the embryo to the mature and final form, sliding into itself with sound inevitability. He is accustomed to stepping back and watching his thoughts, after years of meditating under the instruction of Uncle Luke, and even more years than that having his inner workings shuffled through the hands of Snoke. He is sure that his feelings toward Rey must be _bad_ feelings. Why else would he be afraid of Snoke knowing about them?

He is already wrestling with the strain of keeping Rey and his conflicted feelings from the cohabiter in his consciousness. So when Luke takes him on a brief peace-keeping mission to a remote tribal planet, Ben is brimming with frustration; it ignites and multiplies their usual conflict. When Snoke throws his weight into knocking on Ben's door, Ben does not resist him.

_Why do you think he fears you?_ Snoke asks.

_You say it is because I am powerful and that he fears the Dark in me._

_You're not certain?_

_There's something more to it. If he could just tell me, then I could let him see that there's nothing to fear._

_That is not the way of the Jedi. They do not embrace their passions, much less examine them openly. He will not risk a weakness such as that. Why do you think he stifles your anger and your passion so? These are your strengths._

_My parents didn't see them as strengths._ It is the old argument, the same complaint, like digging into a scar, never allowed to heal.

_No, because their vision is twisted. They assume that the Dark in you is poison; but the venom does not poison the snake._

There is a pause. Then, _Have I ever lied to you?_

_No. No, you are the only one who doesn't lie._

_I do not keep secrets, not like them. Boy, I tell you, the time is coming when you will have to choose. You will see then that they do not choose you. I only hope that by then it will not be too late._

***

Today Ben is quiet, too quiet. It is not his usual lack-of-conversation but a detachment, the sense that he is elsewhere even while he is physically present with her for their swim. He treads water not really watching her, and Rey would be jealous for his attention but that it worries her. She is not aware of the extent of Snoke's possession of him. She knows they are connected, in a kind of mockery of hers and his Force bond, a twisted counterfeit of something good that he tried (will try?) to claim credit for. She knows Snoke cannot make himself manifest to Ben because of Kylo Ren's surprise when she and Ren first connected to each other visually. And when they put their hands together on the hut, neither one took for granted that they would be able to touch.

Rey propels herself to shore, and Ben follows.

"It's not time to go back yet."

"I know," she says, "but my head hurts." It's true enough.

She has brought a bundle with her, of a scrap of tarp picked off of an out-of-commission starfighter, and she unknots it. Inside she's stashed the sweet berries Ben likes, fresh from the vegetable garden, and a flask of peppermint tea. She spreads the canvas in the sun and opens the flask, holding it out to him. He looks at it as though he doesn’t know its purpose before he sits, taking her offering.

He sips from the flask, and Rey chews on a berry with a bovine obstinance.

"Can I ask you what's wrong?"

He sloshes the flask, shakes the spilled tea from his fingers.

"What makes you think something's wrong?"

She sits on her legs to give her some height and angles toward him.

"I can tell."

He closes the flask and hands it back to her. His eyes scrawl downward.

Rey switches tactics. "If I guess what it is that's bothering you ... will you tell me?"

A huffed laugh and a shell of a smile. "Probably not."

His eyes, she wants his eyes. Else how can she communicate to him she is not a threat?

"I'll make a deal with you, though."

Her pulse gallops.

"You ask me a question, and I get to ask you a question."

She jumps on it before she's really thought it through. "Deal!"

They both speak at once.

"Where do you come from?" "What is your earliest memory?"

Rey releases a breath through her nostrils, thin and sharp. A cloud clambers over the sun. There is movement high above. "You first."

Ben draws his knee up to rest his bare arm, pushes a hand through his damp hair, out of his face. She can see him working over something painful. "I don't remember much from ... before, to be honest. I know a few things from what they've told me. Apparently, I was a handful." He laughs but it is without humor. She hurts that he does not see what a joy he is. "I remember they put me out on the lawn in Chandrila because I was getting underfoot. I remember the heavy flower-smell. I remember a blue butterfly...."

Rey hangs off his words, hoping he goes on. But he clamps his jaw and says, "Now you." He turns his eyes on her but she can't be happy about it because he is using them against her. "Where are you from, Rey?"

She puts a berry in her mouth to buy herself some time. She settles on, "the desert."

"That's pretty vague."

"There was no clause about how specific we had to be in our answers."

His short laugh is a little less mirthless this time.

"How do you feel about your father?"

"No, I don't like that question. It's not even in the same star-system as your one-word answer."

"Fine! Do you ... do you have bad dreams?"

He stares forward, and an uninviting breeze blows hair around his prominent ears. "Yes. I notice, when we're swimming, you have a scar on your upper right arm. How did you get it?"

"Fighting. My turn."

"Fighting who?"

"I answered the question. These bad dreams, can you tell me about them?"

"No."

The rain bursts onto them from a punctured sky. They scramble up and skirt the rim of the lake, where an outcropping of rocks protrudes into a crude shelter. Ben goes right beneath it, but Rey stops in the rain. She shivers, but each time it rains it is like the first time. She tilts her face up and inhales its smell.

When she looks down, he is watching her, without apology, and she doesn't feel the wet, bedraggled creature that she is. Only herself. She wants to be seen by him.

"The man I remind you of," he says, though she is not sure if it is still their game, "did you love him?"

"Yes." No hesitation, no regret. Just guillotine-swift affirmation.

"What happened to him?"

"He offered me his hand. I'll never stop regretting that I didn't take it."

She is flayed but unafraid. She lets him pick her over, taking all of her in, all of her ugly, unrefined shapelessness and her reckless, ringing optimism and her regret. 

He holds his hand out to her. 

Rey takes it.

Ben pulls her underneath the shelf of rock, out of the rain, and they stand watching the world dissolve and blur into the primordial canvas at the dawn of creation. Side by side, breath by breath, hand in hand.

***

"The wedding's going to be here!"

The little girls in the dorm are impossible to silence. They clamour like goats caught by their scruff in a fence. Even Voe cannot sustain a fowl mood. It is rare that Jedi marry, and even rarer that two temple-bound ones decide to seal their union among the community.

Rey is as curious as the rest. There were families and couples on her compact island academy, though really only the ones that accompanied children. If adults wanted to start their own families, they went away to the mainland. Only the principal teachers like Finn lingered; their daily life required accessibility.

Rey thinks on the vow exchange between Finn and Rose in the public garden of the city, with only a handful of witnesses and an officiate. Rey stood as bridesmaid and groomsman both, standing in for Poe. He wanted to be there, she knew how much, but the duties of a public servant ask sacrifice for the greater good. "After all," he said, and the smile comes through in his voice even stronger than in the flickering holo, "I named him. I'm practically the father of the groom!"

The wedding is between two senior Jedi. They are late to find one another but they are abundant in joy. One of them is the daughter of wealthy planet-holders on the Outer Rim, and they have arranged for a lavish wedding. For a week leading up to it, droids deliver supplies: rare herbs and linens and sacred flowers the glinting colour of iron ore. The day before, off-world guests start to arrive. They are put up in special housing for visitors to the temple. Some of them take meals with the padawans in the hall, but most of them dine elsewhere, in private quarters, or with Master Skywalker.

The wedding is held out of doors, and the couple stand at the top of the temple steps, with Master Skywalker officiating. The crowd of people observe the Jedi custom and stand for the entire ceremony, though there is no hierarchy, no assigned places -- just an alloy of people in all their human variety. Rey has tried to make herself presentable for the occasion. Her clothes are clean and neat. She wears her combed hair loose and down. She is glad for it when Ben comes to stand behind her, like a wall of warmth at her back. He cannot see the blush creeping up her neck.

The vows are exchanged in the bride's native language. Rey does not understand. But then Ben bends over her. His mouth near her ear. There is no seduction in it, only a quiet attentiveness, and that makes it all the worse. She can feel the shape of his mouth around the words as he translates.

"These two have chosen to forsake separate paths and become one in the Force. The more harmoniously they are joined, the more they become themselves. And so, I ask of you both, standing before this crowd of witnesses today: Megs, do you freely bind yourself to Diego, to be his companion, partner, aide, comfort; the light in his darkness, all the days of your life, until the Force takes you?"

Rey closes her eyes and let's Ben's speech crowd out all else.

"And Diego, do you promise to forsake all others, to be comfort and confidante, friend and lover, the darkness to her light, all of your days, until the Force takes you?"

Rey doesn't hear the shouts and applause that accompany the vow-sealing kiss; only the echo of Ben's voice, imprinting into her very DNA.

***

The party afterwards is like nothing Rey has seen, except for the celebration after the defeat of Palpatine's Final Order. People call to one another across distances with no care for their volume. They slap backs, and pinch cheeks, and peel off a flat shoe to knock out gravel, and then keep them off to go barefoot. Whole-hearted and informal, such a refreshing departure from the solemn structure to the Jedi ways. And there are children! So many children! Rey's heart gluts on their raucous laughter, their squabbles and triumphs. As much as she cherishes the memory of Rose and Finn's intimate gathering, she won't ever be able to imagine a wedding again without children.

There is no formal meal but an orgy of eating, with food and drink replenishing as they dwindle, like a miracle out of a fairy tale. There is meat and Rey indulges when no one is looking. The wine is fermented and sweet. It goes right to the head like a good joke.

The natives of the Messert star system dance with the sexes segregated. There is little to the movements and it is easy to pick up. They sway in and out, closer and further, in an expanding and contracting ring. Voe pulls Rey into the circle of women and chases Tai away when he tries to pick her up by the waist and twirl her around. Rey can see that Ben is enjoying himself in his own way. He stands back watching the dancing, drinking at intervals from his cup, nodding and speaking with guests and Jedi alike. Every now and then he catches her watching him, and he smiles.

When a particularly earnest youth, a visiting dignitary’s son from Coruscant, takes a liking to Rey and she can't shake him, she decides she needs an out. She zeros in on Ben and Tai talking on the other side of a ring of dancers and cuts toward them.

"Jaq, this is my husband, Ben," she says, signalling into Ben’s eyes with her own. Ben looks stricken for a heartbeat and a half, but he rallies stoutly. "Yes. Hello, sweetheart. Who is this?" She slides her hand into his and they face the surprised youth, a unified front.

"This is Jaq Nest, of the Coruscant Nests."

"I didn't realise you were married, Master Rey."

"Neither did I," Tai says drolly. He goes ignored.

"Mrs. Solo, will you do me the honour of this dance?"

"I will, Mr. Solo." And they make their seamless exit into the crowd.

"Why didn't you go to Tai? He's much better at acting than I am."

"Because you were standing right there," she says, as if this is all the answer required.

"Swimming lessons, overenthusiastic suitors intervention, I think you owe me answers to at least six more questions, Rey-from-the-desert."

She shakes her head. "We've got to dance now."

"Why? Is he looking?"

She dives into his line of view. "Well, don't be obvious. Anyway, it's not much of a cover if we don't follow through."

"I don't dance."

"Good. Neither do I."

The music is too lively for pair dancers, for a slow rocking or even a waltz, so she takes his arms and swings him around as though he is a hammer thrown for sport, and when he begs her to stop she is laughing so hard she starts to cough. He pats her on the back, once, twice. She feels foolish and happy.

The night wanes and the party divides into halves. The half, including children and elderly, who have worn themselves to fatigue slink to the outskirts -- while the celebratory veterans carry on in their mirth-heightened frenzy. The bride and groom have long since disappeared, and no one begrudges them their wedding night.

The rumours start as all rumours do. Creeping low to the ground, undetected, until it is time to strike. A few cases before it inflames into epidemic. Those who have taken out their comlinks and datapads get the news first; in other parts of the galaxy it is the height of day, so there is no sleep to slow the spread of information. They tap their neighbours and show them their screens and murmur and cast their darkling glances around with little tact. It slithers its way to Ben and Rey. In the end, it is a child, with the cruelty of candor, who looks across the way and points, "Is that him? That's the one whose grandfather is Darth Vader?"

Ben doesn’t react right away. He gets the look on his face, as though retreating inwards, then comes out again with a chiling calm.

Rey closes her eyes and prays. 

When she opens them again, Ben is striding toward a wedding guest, and he grabs the datapad from his hand. "What is this? Where are you hearing this?" The guest shrinks away. Ben handles the datapad, punches, swipes. He reads silently. He throws down the device, departing, ignoring the protests of the slighted wedding guest.

Rey can only follow, mute and numb. She knows exactly where he is going. He is looking for Luke. All she can do is follow, a few paces behind. She does not know how to intervene, does not know that she even should. But she can't leave him right now, can't leave him to his grief for buzzards to pick over like carrion. If he notices her following, he makes no indication.

They find Luke in the meditation garden, and Rey suspects he has received the news a cycle or so earlier than it got leaked, giving him enough time to come here and reflect on his next course of action. He rests inert, with his head back, as though letting the night air rinse him of iniquity. His unignited saber rests on his knee. Resentment urticates in Rey’s tissue like the sting of a wasp, and she wonders for the millionth time if this is Ben's feelings coming over the bond -- only there is no bond, and this emotion is her own. Ben goes right to Luke, and she sees the older Jedi tense, even as Ben leans, crumpling toward him like a dying spider, his body corrupt with palsy.

" _You_. Did you know about this? About … _Vader_?"

Luke inhales and Ben grabs the saber from off of his knee and throws it. It crashes into the further wall of the garden.

" _Talk to me_!"

Luke sighs; his eyes travel upward to his nephew's face of twisting features. "I knew. I wanted to tell you. Long ago. But your mother begged."

Ben rises to his full height, fists clenched at his sides, seething. It is a premonition, a foretaste, of that bloodless battle on Crait, when Kylo Ren stood humiliated before allies and enemies, and cried out his rage and hurt at the man who should have loved him. Rey can only hang back, because this is nothing to do with her. It is between them.

Ben lets out an animal scream, and it devolves into a sob. "All these years, all this time, I wondered. I thought something was _wrong_ with me. Why my mother looked at me with fear, when she thought I wouldn't notice. Why my father was uncomfortable around me whenever I tapped into the Force. Why you kept me on such a short leash, and refused to answer my questions. You lie. You all _lie_."

"It was not a lie, Ben," and his voice is so calm it makes Rey want to scream too. "We elected to disclose things to you only as you needed to know them. We did this to protect you."

Ben swears. "You're not interested in protecting me. You're trying to _contain_ me."

Luke says nothing. Then his eyes fly up and meet Rey's. She has nothing but cold contempt to feed back to him.

"Yes. Perhaps, a little."

Ben swipes his arm and Luke goes flying. His back slams into the trunk of a tree, and he slumps but doesn't move on the offensive. He stays limp but alert, like a trapper facing off a rathtar. His eyes are alight. Why doesn’t he move? Why doesn’t he deflect, or defend? He must not wish to antagonise Ben, but he should have thought through that before he went skinking away and left his nephew to find out alone.

Ben screams, a formless, wounded howl, and leaves.

***

She knows where he's gone. To the lake, under the canopy of darkness, in the pitiless night. Finds him under the outcropping they sheltered beneath just the other day. He leans over the water, scowling at his reflection, tearing at his eyes with the flat of his arm, blinding himself with tears. He has never looked so young to her. As Rey approaches, he looks at her and his face is so brittle, she trips back. Then it crumples beneath fresh tears. He sinks to his knees, with his face in his hands.

Rey goes to him. She reaches out. His hand snatches up and grabs her wrist. He squeezes with a punishing grip, fixes her with wild, rufescent eyes.

"What are you _doing_?”

Rey feels fear the way only a desert orphan can. It makes her fight. She wrenches her wrist from him and throws him into a lock with the Force, but he is already opposing her with the same power, and they wrestle, each trying to maneuver the other but neither budging. They fight like that, two unyielding forces of nature refusing to give into the other. At last their strength breaks down under exertion. Rey feels Ben's hold let up, even as she sinks, and she reaches for him, and he catches her, and they collapse, a wreck of bodies on the soft-damp soil.

Rey gets her hold on him. Fresh sobs choke his throat. Rey cannot shush him or offer him words of comfort, because what can she say? He needs to feel his hurt -- but she won't let him hurt alone. Drained from their struggle, she strokes his hair, and he puts his face into her neck and reddens it with rough tears.

After a while, Ben's sobs reside into struggled breaths. He lifts his head from her throat, enough for the cool night air to crawl over it. Then he dips his face back down, pressing his lips against her.

Heat spears through Rey's body.

He pulls away a mere inch, turns his head and kisses her throat again, further up, beneath the juncture of neck and jaw. Rey ceases stroking but continues to hold him, still as a death effigy. When he puts his face into her neck a third time, it is sloppy and insatiate. Teeth and too-large lips and a wet mouth that wants without discretion.

The heat impales her and she doesn't know who or where she is. When he slides his lips from the curve of her neck, underside her jaw, and mashes them to her mouth, she is blinded as though staring into the furnace of a white dwarf star. It is good and terrible and death and life and ending and beginning and she -- she --

\-- she pulls away. " _Stop_."

He does. His face is near, so near. His voice a sighing of trees. "Why? I thought this is what you wanted?"

"I did. I do! But -- not like this."

The veil falls between them, no -- a cavernous divide the likes of the rift on Starkiller but worse, because he is too near to be so far. His eyes glitter, but with the hardness of gems and not of tears.

"No. You don't want _Vader's_ scion. Or is it, now that you can finally have me, you know too well that I can never be _him_?"

"No! That's not--! I want you to want--!"

He doesn't wait for explanation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the last chapter before Easter. englishable pointed out that it ends on a cliff-hanger, I actually do not plan to do this, it just happens naturally! I like the high of cutting off the narrative when it's really juicy. I'm sorry!!!! Comment if you enjoyed? Comment if you hated?


	14. Chapter 14

> _Gorau adnabod, d'adnabod dy hun._ The best knowledge is to know yourself. -- Welsh proverb

Ben propels himself through the foliage, dense and knotted like his insides, his only thought to get away. He must put distance between himself and the hurt that swallows and smacks its lips. Snoke will be here any minute, salting the wounds, and Ben does not know if he can or wants to block him. As he pushes through the jungle, he takes out his lightsaber, ignites it, and slashes the unoffending trees. He cannot be here. He has to leave.

He emerges from the jungle into the quieting temple grounds; guests have wandered back to their quarters, a lonely instrument sings its swan song. Ben easily avoids human contact, but as he steps toward his dark hut, someone sits on the doorstep, head bowed and hands clasped. Ben approaches, and Tai stands. He gives Ben a smile that would infuriate Ben on anyone else. 

"Well?" Tai says.

Ben drops on the step next to him and sinks his face in his knees.

***

Rey sits exactly where he left her, with her face sunk into her knees. The pain in her head swells and thunders. 

She must act, but what to do? She is afraid of harming Ben further, of pushing him away or to do something desperate. She might go to Master Skywalker and confront him, guard him from further compromising his vulnerable nephew. What she must _not_ do is nothing. She rouses herself with this conclusion and begins to walk. Each step hammers the top of her spine into the base of her skull. She follows the Force signature that cradles her day in and day out, and finds herself on the path to Ben's hut, amidst the winding-down and furling-up of the evening's festivities. When she comes within viewing distance, she sees two people sitting before his door. It is Tai and Ben. They are talking. Rey's resident panic starts to reach out but she pulls it back. Tai looks and sees her. Their gazes clasp, and Tai nods -- or she thinks he does, she cannot be sure. It is dark, and she is not well. What she is sure of in that moment is that Ben will be all right, for now.

She wants to go to him. She _wants_. It is not about what _she_ wants. Tai has him. He is safe. So she goes away.

***

"What do you want to do?" Tai asks him. He has lowered himself to sit again.

Ben is silent, staring into his lap between his raised knees.

"Will you talk to her? Your mother, I mean?"

"She's the last person I want to speak to right now." He straightens his legs and throws back his head, stifling a groan.

"Yeah. So ... you stick around here. It'll be hard for a while, but you know how it is, some fresh gossip will sweep through the academy, this will be old news, and everyone will forget about it."

"I don't think people will forget that the Emperor's own protege is Leia Organa's father. Or that she hid it from the wider public." He snaps his head up. "She was foolish to do that. She has no hopes of winning the Senate seat now."

"You're not your parents' mistakes, Ben. This isn't a reflection on you, not in the least."

"I know _you_ believe that, Tai. But the wider world doesn't see it that way. I've been groomed since birth to be this ... _heir_ of greatness ... in some form or other. If not for the better, then for the worse. Every time I look for a way out, I'm backed into the corner."

"So who do _you_ want to be, Ben?"

He gnaws his lower lip. "I don't know. No one's ever asked me that before."

"That's what you should be asking yourself. Not what everyone else wants, but what _you_ do. If you can find the answer to that, maybe you will find your way out."

Ben looks at his friend. He would like to hug him, but he is not sure how. Nevertheless, he thinks Tai understands.

***

Rey goes to the dorm, and climbs into her bed, and sleeps a troubled sleep. Her headache has not abated by morning. The first thing she does when she wakes is reach out for Ben in the Force. She has only grown more uncomfortable with "Jedi mind tricks" as she's aged. The hand-wavy attitude (pun intended) of her predecessors was easy to overlook in war. In times of peace, less so. She will just check in on him, she tells herself. But a peek becomes the swing of a door.

He is _leaving_!

She kicks out of bed; ignores the pummelling of her brain, the acrid thirst. The day outside dawns cool and still after a night of activity. Dew beads in the grass. Rey has not bothered to dress, nor to put on shoes. She wears the black sweater and runs.

The docking bay is away from the temple and the academy, through a wooded patch and suspended over the open mouth of a granite pit. Beneath the pit are subterranean floors of hangars and storage rooms, rarely in use. They are all but abandoned this early in the morning. Rey has not had reason to come here; though once she accompanied Voe to pick up a delivery for the infirmary. Her feet slap durasteel, passing the many starships and speeders docked for the wedding. She knows where Ben's personal ship lives, kept like a pet, a superfluous luxury for a Jedi. He is there, soldering some copper wires beneath the port wing, when she pulls up and halts to avoid the spark showers.

"Where are you going?"

He turns toward her voice, knocking the wind out of her. He wears a featureless and commonplace mask -- the one mechanics use for protection -- but it has landed its blow. Her skull fairly screams. She wants to pry it from his face, but he intervenes before she does something stupid, lifting the mask up and over and dropping his arm. His limbs hang at his sides. He takes in her dishevelled presentation, her wild, sprinted breathing. 

His bare-faced look is vacant, steady. It is not much better than the soldering mask. "I don't know," he says. "Somewhere. Away from here."

Rey wraps her arms around herself. Chill shudders through her body. She is half-naked, but she makes a step in readiness. "I'm coming, too."

"No, you're not."

"I don't think you should be alone right now."

"That's not really for you to decide."

He doesn't want her. What kind of person is she, to molest him, to follow him and disregard him when he has asserted authority over his own destiny? Is she any better than Snoke, claiming to love him, not letting him alone, to be his own person? She takes a step toward him, through a curtain of vertigo.

"Where I came from, I knew a little girl. Someone I loved very much. When she was upset or angry, she ran away. And -- I understood that. I do it, too. There are two things I'm good at: waiting, and running. So I would try to give her a minute -- a day, an hour -- but I never left her alone in the end. I knew her, you understand. I held her in my arms from the moment of her birth and watched her learn to walk with that unshakeable faith all children have, to see and believe. I knew that when she grew angry, said, I hate you, I don't want to see you ever again, that she wanted me to fight it. She wanted me to fight for _her_. To come after her. To chase her, if need be.

"You're not a child, Ben, and I know that. You can make your own decisions, your own mistakes, but you don't own mine. I _will_ follow you. Maybe not with you, maybe always a heartbeat, a cycle, a light speed jump, a star system, a lifetime behind. And you can hate me, if you want to. I'm prepared for that. But I'm not letting you go."

He looks at her. She cannot read his expression. He sets down the mask and soldering iron; stares.

She licks her lips. Her tongue is thick and dry. "So? What will it be? Are you going to let me on the Grimtaash? Or will you leave me behind and make me track you and trail you? Make your choice. Because I’ve made mine."

There is an insect-wing movement, a fluttered hand to his waist, and the lightsaber is out, hardening the mist like a gorgon's stare.

"I'll stop you." The Kylo Ren to his voice cannot be credited to a modulator.

Rey swallows. Sandpaper grinds in her throat. Her ears peal. "You could try." She has no lightsaber to speak of. But she knows he knows -- if she did, she wouldn't draw it.

The flattened voice, without inflection, without feeling. A twitch beneath his left eye. "And you're prepared to die?"

She can’t fear him. He has never raised a hand in threat against her all her weary life, that was not to help or to give.

"To keep you from the sins that would eat your heart from the inside out? Yes." She blinks, trying to steady her swimming vision.

The lightsaber retracts with a sweep. "It's not just that I remind you of _him_ , is it?"

"No. I told you it's you, and it _is_."

He looks around the docking bay, his cool dissolved, and Rey holds back a laboured exhale. 

His throat bobs. "The little girl. That's the first time you've actually told me something about yourself without me having to pry it out from you."

She stares. He is right. (He's always right, about the island, about the Jedi, about everything.)

Ben looks at her, at last, and he is an open sore of hope. "Tell me more. About you."

Rey plunges through nausea, takes a step toward him. She releases the air through pinched nostrils, regulating the oxygen flow to her bloodstream, clean and steady. "I raised myself. I come from Jakku, and my favourite colour is green. 

"When I was six -- at least, I think I was six, I was not so good at telling the passage of time in the beginning-- a travelling merchant showed me a flowering plant, and I cried. I thought it was bleeding.

"When I was eight, I stole an extra portion from a little boy, and it made me so sick with guilt that I threw it up after. 

"When I was thirteen, I once went for two days without drinking. I thought I was going to die, so I laid myself out on a pallet and arranged my two or three things around myself so that whoever found me would believe someone had loved me enough to mourn me. 

"My favourite story is a scavenger tale about a man who stole the moon, and married her. 

"I eat ... _everything_. I don't dance, you already know that, but I sing when I think nobody is listening. I'm _not_ a morning person.

"I love a little girl named Paige because I loved her parents first, and -- it's funny, how two people's love can take on its own sentience and walk about with a head full of curls and a mouth full of backtalk and a spirit of star fire. And now I love her for her own sake, as well as mine.

"I hate the things that happened to me but I can't bring myself to wish them away because what would I even be if not this? Who am I? Is a person just a collection of inherited genes? I don't like being vulnerable. It makes me feel small. I've had to take care of myself for so long, I get hung up on the notion that I can fix everyone and everything, because I can patch a droid or bleed an engine, which is absurd because people are not things, and I can't even fix myself! 

"I don't know what it's like to have a mother but I want to be one more than anything... And that scares me because what if I _ruin_ someone?"

She thinks Ben might be moving toward her, but her surroundings wheel, and she can no longer tell which way is up and which is down.

"I want so much to be pleasing, to be accepted, to be loved. And I know I'm gifted in the Force, and I try not to be flippant about it, but I would give it all away without hesitation if it meant being with the people I love. I thought it made me special and wanted but it just makes me lonely. I see that it makes you lonely, too. So I thought ... maybe ... we c-could ... be lonely ... t-together..."

She takes a step to meet him. But the pulsing miasma behind her eyes engulfs her first. Her consciousness shuts, like a door to the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to this community, for keeping me connected during these unprecedented times. Each of you knows who you are. <3


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of the chapter earns its M rating.

Luke has been lenient on Rey, letting her slip into academy life without a leash and work herself into the pattern until she blends seamlessly. He has let his guard down, lulled by her calming influence on Ben. 

And now this -- he warned his sister about enemies should she run for senate. But Leia is fearless, recklessly so. Han's bravado is all stupidity. He doesn't think before he jumps. Leia's is more calculating, and for that, all the more dangerous. He knows she's tried to contact Ben. Because she has reached for Luke, which she would only resort to had her first attempts to calm her son failed. He lets her calls go unanswered, and plays back the recordings, her voice tight with desperation.

“Luke … you don’t need to say it. I know. You were right. Just … tell me that he’s okay. He is okay … isn’t he? Luke…?” 

He doesn't know who he's angrier with, her or himself.

Ben is leaving, and for once, Luke thinks better than to meddle. A better person than him could, perhaps. Someone who hasn't hurt Ben with so much clumsy intervention already. Ben doesn't bother asking leave of him, but he can feel the decision bearing down in Ben's mind. Rey, so skilled at muting her Force presence to the point of invisibility, he does not detect because he did not look for her. So he is not expecting, early the next morning, to be roused from drowsing by the boy's panic sounding a siren through the Force; and the still more alarming, in-person vision of him carrying a limp and colourless Rey into the infirmary.

"She just passed out," Ben says. His contempt for his uncle swept under by his overpowering concern. Luke has not heard Ben’s voice shake so since he was a little boy. 

"Bring her in, quickly, lie her down." Luke directs Ben through the door, having arrived a minute before and already programmed the med droids. "I'll get an intravenous line into her, you fetch Master Navess."

Ben lays Rey on the infirmary cot but lingers like an over-large mosquito, and Luke adds an emphatic " _now_!" before Ben detaches his hands from Rey’s shoulders and backs out of the infirmary.

***

Rey wakes. She hears a humming -- not the organic hum of the jungle and prairie and sky but the sterile efficient medley of sighing machines. It smells clean and metallic, and faintly of bacta and antiseptic. A numbness fizzles in her head, and her body weighs heavy. She looks aside, to see Voe in a chair watching her.

"How do you feel?" Voe asks.

"I'm..." Before she can answer, Rey tenses and tries to sit. A beeping rises with her pulse.

Voe stands and presses Rey back down. "You can't get up. Even if you weren't medicated, you're connected to all sorts of wires and apparatuses that would prevent you from getting very far."

"Where's--"

"Ben? He's been here for hours with you. Don't worry. He's only gone now to get something to eat, because Master Navess threatened to put you in isolation behind a saber-proof blast door."

Rey exhales; the release sinks her into the pillow. "He didn't leave."

Voe eyes her, a look Rey can't read for her severe black brows, in direct contrast to the snowy white of her hair. "Leave you? No way. There are only three things that weirdo likes in the whole galaxy: his calligraphy, his starship, and you."

Rey smiles. _Ow_. Even smiling hurts.

"Voe." The voice of Master Skywalker comes from somewhere behind. Rey would not turn to look even if she could lift herself from the bed. "Give me a minute to speak with Rey alone, would you? And guard the door from Ben!"

***

Master Skywalker gathers his robes to shift into the seat vacated by Voe. Rey watches him. He looks heavier than he did the day before. His wrinkles settled like calcified rills around the eyes and mouth.

"How long have you been having the headaches?"

Rey looks away from him.

"Rey."

"A few weeks, maybe longer." Out of the window, she can see the black hill that is Ben exchanging words with Voe. He moves his hands in arcs like gliding birds. Voe shakes her head.

"Do you know what's wrong with you?"

The question snaps her away from the window. She looks down. She has an idea.

"The med droids have been running diagnostic tests all morning. There is nothing _physically_ wrong with you. But your readings are all off.” He picks up a datapad and starts to shuffle through the readings she cannot see. “White blood count too high. Oxygen levels down. Even your kidneys aren’t functioning as they should for someone of your age and health. Rey, your body is struggling to work. It’s as though it’s just … shutting down.”

Master Skywalker folds the datapad into his lap beneath his hands. “Who are you, Rey? Why are you here?"

Her voice is loose but barbed, like a necklace of thorns. "Why should I trust you?"

He recalibrates. Rey waits for him to say any number of things: that he is the great Luke Skywalker, that he has accepted her willingly into his academy. What he says is: "You need to trust someone."

Rey looks back to the window. She can no longer see Ben and Voe, and she feels lonesome for one, or both of them. She closes her eyes. "I'm from the future. But you know that, don't you?"

" _A_ future. And I had my suspicions."

"Why is my body deteriorating?"

Luke sighs. "There's too much we don't know about the blueprints of reality: how much of it is mere suggestion, how much is canon, like the canon of the Jedi texts. It's like trying to navigate the innards of a massive Death Star without droid intel, without a map. And no one has been able to get outside and get a good look at it long enough to make a proper study, or to come back with something resembling comprehensible explanations for our limited human brains, not even the dead. It may be that something in the journey itself unraveled your carbon base, the atoms upon which your very physicality is built. Or perhaps your being here is a paradox that the universe is seeking to integrate. I can't make a better guess if you don't tell me more."

"What do you know about the First Order?"

"The First Order? The Empire loyalists and malcontents causing trouble in the Outer Rim? What do they have to do with it?"

"They have everything to do with it," Rey snaps. "Because I come from a timeline in which the First Order will reign unchallenged; the New Republic, a barely-held together puppet state with corruption rotting it from the inside out; and your sister, so far from running for senate, will despair of democracy entirely and come out of retirement to lead a military resistance, throwing all of civilisation into yet another galactic war!"

"And you're here to stop that from happening, is that right?"

Rey clenches her teeth.

"You are aware that if you change the future, you could cease to exist in the present?"

"No."

"No?"

"This is only one timeline. I've seen the others. They are like … oh, I don’t know. Like faceted gems, or the stamens of flowers. Fractals repeating to infinity. The existence of one does not negate the other. Everything that is, is. What isn't, isn't."

"You seem very confident."

"The worlds I saw when I travelled here didn't flicker in and out. It may be that the World Between Worlds takes on the properties of matter to appear to the sense-handicapped human eye. But logic is logic across all boundaries. They will remain, they must remain. How can they be then not be, in a place outside of place, or a time outside of time? I've studied the divergence texts for over a decade. I've meditated; measured the cost. I would not come if it had endangered all those whose lives carry on, without me.”

Master Skywalker stares at her, hard. He leans in. “Who gave you the Jedi texts?”

Her mouth opens, and she tongues her bottom lip. “You did.”

His stare gentles, inch by inch. He leans back.

“I mean, you … showed them to me.”

Master Skywalker puts his blunt fingertips to his brows and kneads them. “You’re my padawan,” he states.

“No.” Rey grits, to pull up on the childish indignance. “I mean, for a time I was. Not long.”

“And who trained you after? Was it Ben?”

“I did.” She adds, quietly, “and General Leia helped.” She starts at the sound of his chuckle. Cocks a brow at him.

“I should have guessed,” he says, his voice mellow and warm. It sounds like affection. “Did she send you back here?”

“No. I came on my own.”

Master Skywalker strokes his beard. “Then … no one instructed you to keep me in the dark, about this?”

Rey swallows. “No one; but my own sense of judgement.”

He narrows his eyes at her but it is not malignant. “I’ve hurt you,” he says. “Or will do.” He leans forward again. “Child, tell me. How will I fail?” 

Rey sees him, in that moment, just as he is. A small, bent figure on the precipice of disaster. The landscape of the future he looks across illuminates as though by lighting flash. The years weigh on him, hills and hills retreating to his back, and before him, the arid valley of uncertainty. He inherited a dynasty, just as she did: a name for which he did not ask. Rey knows, all too well, the insistent, pin-sharp drive, the sense of waiting for the ceiling to drop. She sees the grief-maddened glint reflected in his eyes the night he betrayed Ben Solo.

“If I told you,” she says, “I don’t believe you could endure it.”

***

Rey says nothing more to Luke Skywalker. Sleep comes and sits over her like a heavy mist. She is aware, at the other end of consciousness, of raised voices, arguing. Then she goes out.

Rey wakes some time later -- how much time, she cannot say. The numb buzzing in her head is gone, replaced by a sinking sleepiness. Feeling warms through her body, and she is aware of something in her hand. She flexes her fingers. There is an answering squeeze. 

She looks down to where Ben has wrapped his palm around her knuckles and below their clasped hands, his head rests on the edge of the bed in precarious danger of sliding off, bringing the whole monument of his body crashing down. He sleeps. Eyes closed, lips parted, whispering incoherent, babbled phrases. His facial muscles twitch and contract, causing the moles on his face to jerk and dance. Rey places her hand over his hairline. Her thumb strokes his eyebrow, and the trembling agitation of his lips tapers off and ceases. She joins him in sleep directly.

***

They do not speak about her sickness, what it means, though Rey guesses Ben has verbally battered the information out from the doctor and his uncle until they were blue from lack of oxygen. 

She feels fine. Really fine. With some medication, Master Navess assures her, and paying special attention to nutrition and exercise, her symptoms are manageable, at least for a time. It is the tiredness that lingers and keeps her in bedrest, more than anything. Those two days she reclines, idle for the longest stretch of time ever in her life, and Ben stays with her. There is no more talk of him leaving. He brings her tiny, white scalloped blooms in a can swiped from the gardening shed and sets them up on the far window ledge in her line of vision, so that she does not have to strain to look at them. He brings news of the students, of Voe's latest inconveniences with the freshly dedicated younglings; of the padawans’ rivalries and how they play out to epic climax. 

"Jira is the queen, now," he says, and Rey's laughter prompts his own. "No, I mean it! She's come into her own. It's like once they realised she didn't care anymore, that gave her all the power."

"Good for her," Rey says.

Ben brings his books and reads to her. Not Jedi books of formal doctrine but storybooks of his childhood: Alderaanean fairy tales and histories of the Old Republic. He hardly fits in the chair, so he puts his legs out to make his body a rigid level up to his shoulders; the latter curl in atrocious posture, giving him the look of a crowbar. It can't be good for his neck! He is very expressive when he reads. The brows knit, peaking upward, and the muscles around his mouth find new ways of contorting his pliant lips. Rey leans back in her pillow, glad that the reading takes his eyes so that she can watch his face without censure.

On the day of her discharge, Ben stands in the corner with his arms crossed, his silence a different temperature than usual. Rey is dressed (her black sweater wrestled from off of her by chore-inveterate Voe -- _it’s laundry day, Rey!_ ), sitting up with her legs off the side of the bed, while Master Navess takes her pulse and blood pressure one final time.

She braves a look at Ben, and though his countenance is dark, he spares her a smile.

***

"Are we going to talk about it?"

He’s settling her into her new accommodation, though she has little to speak of. He’s brought her a fresh posy of flowers to set on her new window ledge, and he watches her unfold the paper with his ink-scrawled poem and line the stems of the blooms perpendicular to its edge.

"What?" Really, she should know better than to play coy with him.

"Everything. You, me, this? How much longer you have? Don't you have loved ones you ought to contact? Paige, and her parents? And do you _want_ to be here? I can take you, wherever you need to go."

She reaches into the ratty satchel and takes out a wire figurine, like a doll, and sets it next to the poem and flowers. "I've just ... there are things I've got to do here, still. My work's not finished."

He tucks his hands into his sleeves. "And what is that?"

She looks at him with a freshness of humour that staggers. "Watching over you, of course."

He scoffs, and tries to fling his blush away with a look awry. "What makes you think it's not the other way around?"

He can’t see her, but her voice flows steady. "Ben. I meant what I said. In the hangar. I'd do anything. Whatever you need. It's not that I don't think you're capable, I just ... want you to know that."

He swallows. Inhales. Meets her, eye to eye. "How can you know me, better than anyone? How can you look inside me and not shrink at my ugliness?"

She gets close, and he doesn’t pull back but doesn’t lean into her. She cups a hand to his cheek, and he closes his eyes. "Because. We're the same."

His eyes fly open, to catch hers again. "You don't know what kind of darkness I have inside me."

She drops her hand to level with him sternly. "Don't I? Am I not a person, too? We've all got light and darkness in us, Ben. We've all got ... voices ... vying for dominance. I don't think silencing one or the other is the answer. They both have their place. We've got to expose the dark to the light of day, and that will never happen if we keep it locked away and deny its existence."

He crosses his arms into his sleeves again. “You make it sound so easy.”

She returns her hands to either side of his face, tilting it down to meet his forehead with hers. He can’t see her, they are too close. But he feels the brush of something in his mind, like cracking open a window. 

"I miss you," she whispers. 

He pulls back, alarmed. "What do you mean? I'm right here." 

She gives him a watery smile.

"I miss you here." She brushes her fingertips beneath the line of her hair.

He takes her wrist gently. "Tell me what to do."

This time, her smile quivers as though about to break. "Make room for me.” She presses him with a laser-stare, with a precision so close and raw that he knows exactly what she is asking him to do. _“Please_."

She must know that if she stands there, begging him with her eyes any longer, he’ll grab her and kiss her. Because she steps around him and goes out of the hut.

That night, Ben closes the door on Snoke. He locks and bolts it and turns away and doesn't look back.

***

Rey is excused from the strict academy rule, but she carries on as normal. Except that she has her own private accommodation, and that she goes often into Master Skywalker's confidence to confer over holocom with the Republic authorities, listing details of coordinates and names. They use phrases like “covert operation” and “anonymous informant.” Master Skywalker reminds them that Republic authority is limited in the Jedi domain, though they are keepers of the peace by tradition and will do everything they can to honour that legacy. 

Leia asks to come to them, but Rey requests she stays away. "I don't think Ben would like it," she says. "He needs time."

Ben teaches her how to play holochess. It takes far too much planning for Rey to master. When he wins nine times out of ten, Rey play-accuses him of cheating. To which Ben replies, straight of posture and straighter of face, "You’re just jealous that I’m the better one for a change." She gasps but cannot peel the grin from her mouth. Comments, the way one does on the ordinary functions of a baby, all awe and tenderness, "You're _funny_."

Sometimes, Rey gets tired, and she sits down wherever she stands to rest but she falls asleep. Nobody rouses her when this happens. She either wakes to the stillness of their community having moved on around her, like the moon-pulled tide; or in the cozy night in her own bed with her shoes removed and her black sleep shirt laid out on top of her (smelling so strongly of Ben she is sure he is the one who has carried her back and tucked her in).

They carry on with swimming lessons, though she has long since ceased needing them. One day Ben brushes the back of his fingertips along her arm in passing. "Swimming tonight?"

She ducks her head. She is _really_ too old to be bashful. “Yes, please.”

"What time?"

"After curfew. Meet me in the usual place." Neither bother to elaborate.

***

It is quiet in Ben’s head, for the first time in his life. If Snoke has battered at the door to be let back in, Ben has closed it too soundly, and sealed the cracks air-tight. Could it have been this easy, all along? Or did it only become possible when Rey showed him how?

The jungle is a blue light-bath and the lake a deeper bath still. She is already waiting for him, her bare feet in the lapping water. She turns, and though the light of the moons engulfs her and casts her front into shadow, he feels her smile.

She comes onto the shore to meet him. He draws her around so that he can see her, though he swears it's her own glow, and not the moons’.

“I don’t want us to swim,” she tells him.

“I didn’t really think you did.” 

She tugs at a lock of hair that lies aside her neck. She shivers, though it isn’t cold. "I've never been with a man before."

Her words take a few tries before fitting themselves into proper meaning for him. "Why are you telling me this?"

She clasps her hands, he notices, to keep them from trembling. "I think you know why."

He does. "I've never been with a woman."

A sharp inhale. "I -- I didn't know for sure, I -- but I hoped."

There is something she first needs to understand. He has a power over her -- not only his own, but the man’s whom she loved first. "I don't want to use you."

"You wouldn't be using me.” Her words unravel to him, an invitation. “You'd be letting me love you. Please let me love you."

And he wants her, too. Not in the boyish, skin-deep way of confused youth, the way his body reacted without his consent to the presence of pretty girls. The trespassing dreams chased by sunrise, leaving him more cold, more alone than before. He wants to know her, from the inside out. And -- not for his own sake! There is surprisingly little of personal want to it. Oh, the man in him will be ravenous, he has no doubt. But the scared little boy huddled in his chest cavity wants to comfort, to take away her lonesomeness. He wants to give her this. Can't he give her this?

"All right."

He lets her take the lead. She blushes but her fingers unwrap him like they have known him all his life. They stand, not touching, as she lets the robes slip off of his shoulders. And she is looking at him in a way that burns away the residual shame, she -- she almost worships him. Except there is no pressure from her to be better, _more_ than he is. She meets him in the present, and opens herself to the experience of him, whatever that might bring. He is lost to the freedom of it. Now her palm hovers over him, as though he is fire and she is trying to get warm. It seems like she will be content in this non-touch forever.

"What are you doing?"

It's a wonder she can hear the low resonance of his voice. Perhaps she feels it through her fingertips. "Memorising you."

He grabs her hand and presses it to his skin. She shivers but doesn't pull away.

Now he moves, the same marriage of grace and precision with which he wields a lightsaber. As though he was born to do it. Tugging, pulling, dragging. Her clothes fall away from her and they stand face to face, body to body in the moonlight, completely bared to one another. 

He doesn't move. He needs her to come to him.

And she does. She pushes him down in the soft grass: artless, fumbling. She catches him once or twice with her nails. Has to climb back on after losing her balance. He helps by holding her hips. After she blew into his life with a proficiency that maddened, her clumsiness is endearing. She has no idea what she's doing, but neither does he. Eventually, they fit themselves together, and with whispered instruction they are on their way.

He is hyper aware of his largeness with her, and he doesn't realise how he has been holding back until instinct takes over and he flips her. She yelps but does not lessen her hold on him. He is approaching the point of no return. This is not like in dreams, when he makes love to a faceless apparition, the flesh demanding what the flesh will. This is grace in a garden. This is the origin of what Snoke warped and tried to sustain him with. 

All those years, no wonder he starved. It was only shadows on the wall all along.

And at the height of his vulnerability, when he is powerless, soul-naked and flayed in a way he never knew possible, she praises him. Well done. There you are. You're beautiful. I love you.

This final admission does not startle him. He knows. Somehow, he's always known.


	16. Chapter 16

The first time they climb toward a clear, swift summit; the second time, they go slowly, deliberately, exploring detours and byways, and Ben touches her and measures his success by the change of her breathing, by her hushed -- and then warbling -- affirmation.

***

He can see that Rey is very tired, so he doesn't ask for a third time. He continues to learn her, not for eroticism’s sake, but for the inquisitive neophyte he is. She is a woman, and so starkly different in her subtleties, yet so complimentary. If they stood in the same room all their lives fully clothed and never touched, her very presence would highlight his own masculinity to him. He wouldn't be a man, if she didn't first exist as a woman to define him.

He discovers there is a certain place on the sole of her foot, near the arch and beneath the ankle, that is sensitive to the faintest pressure. He skims his fingers over it, causing her leg to twitch.

“Aaaaahh, don’t _do_ that!”

He presses his thumb to it, biting tongue in teeth, keen to experiment.

"S-stop!" She flails involuntarily, and he dodges a well-deserved kick to his face.

To make it up to her, he wedges an arm beneath her head and shoulders to cradle her, and presses a staccato of soft, dry kisses to her lips as she talks, in her usual way, about nothing and everything. Every third word is muffled by his mouth.

“Tell me … mmmabout … your childhood … your fammbly ...”

So he does.

He opens; and once worried in, her question becomes a grain of sand that must polish its way out. He tells her about his uncle and mother, who found each other when they were already grown, and didn’t know they were kin until well after that; about his father’s shady history running spice and how he won the Falcon; he tells her about the time before things started to sour, when his mothers’ smiles came fresh and fast as rainfall and he wanted to be a pilot like his father.

“Your father loves you. Very much.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because of the Falcon. She’s his and he’s hers, and that’s the way of it. Nobody can say a word against her, and he’d kill for her. That’s how he feels about you.”

Ben handles this as one does an unstable kyber crystal, looking for weaknesses.

“I don’t feel like his. They gave me his name: Solo. But it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Why does it have to mean anything? It’s yours.”

And he finds that that is true.

“Better to have something new and unburdened than one bearing the weight of its predecessors. I tried on a name like that, for a while, but it didn’t fit. Anyway, I wanted a different name. But by the time I could admit it to myself, I’d given up trying to be someone I’m not.”

“The man’s name.”

“... Yes.”

“Did he love you?”

He can hear her throat working around an answer. “I don’t know. I think he could have, if he’d lived.”

Ben lets himself think of him: a shadow wearing his features, tethered to him by the love of a woman. A temptation wriggles into him, then; it would be as nothing, while she slept, to go through her thoughts and memories and seek out this man. To pin his rival like the carcass of an insect, to study, taking far too much pleasure in pulling off a wing.

“Do you think that this darkness I have in me is because of Vader?”

Rey stiffens. “No,” she says, taut enough to snap. “No, I don’t.”

“It makes more sense now. Why they feared me. Have they worried all this time that I could become like him? Fuck, Rey, I can’t ever have anything of my own, not even this. Not even my darkness. It’s all fucking _inheritance_.”

“I don’t believe that,” she says. “I don’t believe we are only our progenitors. I can’t.” The fragility in her voice is that of wind shifting over broken glass.

Maybe, he thinks, and the shade of Vader stands long over the course of his life, maybe I’m not as alone as I think I am.

“We’re more than a collection of inherited genes and secondhand surnames. Ben. Ben, you have to listen. If you only ever hear one thing I ever say, hear this. You could be anyone or you could be no one: but you’ll always be _someone_ , _to me_.”

He hears her words, though he doesn’t understand them. It seems to him that he stands overlooking a black abyss, a fall with no bottom, and Rey’s words attach to him like tiny tethers, as delicate and strong as the silk of a spider’s web.

Rey nips him, in the sensitive flesh inside his arm, like a kitten. “Hey. Come back.”

He holds her against him and pins her with a tree-trunk limb. He puts his face into the wreath of her hair and murmurs, “I’m right here.”

***

Rey starts to drift off, so he wraps them passably well in their clothing, hoists her onto his back, and carries her out of the jungle to her bare, moon-flooded hut. He lays her on the bed and brings a basin of water and a clean towel. She cleans herself, then she pulls him to sit next to her and washes him as well. This is just as intimate as their lovemaking, and it is his turn to shiver.

When she finishes, she tugs on the oversized black sweater, but he has nothing clean, so he climbs in beside her naked as a newborn, and she wraps him around her like an old cloak, as if sleeping with his presence is something she has done every night of her life.

***

He lies on his back, staring, watching the blue light of night track across the curved ceiling. Rey has wrapped herself around his arm and with some regret, he wiggles out of her hold and shakes it out, dispensing the pins-and-needles, resettling it around her shoulders. 

His feelings are wild birds he can't capture, but every now and then, one will land in the limb of his sight for him to study. Rey is warm and good. He knows this the way all diurnal creatures know the sun. He wants her. Though his want is hard to define. He looks at it from different angles, all of them dazzling. He wants to know where she sleeps every night because he is sleeping next to her. And he wants to know what she eats every meal because he is eating with her. He wants to listen to her rambling stories, and tease her about holochess and swimming and the sensitive flesh of her insole; share his day’s labour, its victories and its losses; he wants for her to spar with him on the grass beneath running clouds and not fear knocking him down, overpowering him with her wild and flaring strength because she knows he knows that she would never, never hurt him. He wants parting to be just another joyful chance for them to come together again; so he can feel her nearby and not know what she does but know that he could change that, in a moment, by going to find her, and reassuring himself that she is real, but that she is not him, nor is he her, either. He wants her to stand a bit taller and circle him possessively when the pretty padawans try to flirt. And maybe he wants to intervene with the hopeful bachelors who shadow her at gatherings with the very public claim of a kiss.

He would like to make her a mother.

***

She sleeps late, and it worries him. He swipes them food from the kitchen, and the few who see him know not to pester from the moody set of his brows. When he returns, she is still sleeping. So he rouses her, softly at first, then with more urgency, until she opens her eyes with a deep inhale and breaths for the both of them.

"It's okay," she says, brushing the fringe fallen into his face. He is sitting on the bed in yesterday's clothing, bent near, and he is sure his blood thaws to her smile. "I'm okay. Just tired. Last night..."

"I pushed you too much."

"No," she says, and gives a little stretch, "no. It was good." Her blush temporarily freshens her pallor. “You were good.”

She's not interested in eating, but he won't let her alone until she swallows five bites of rice and drains the cup of jogan juice. Her complexion improves a bit, but her sallowness makes him fear she is anaemic.

“A day’s rest and I’ll be fine,” she assures him.

They have avoided the topic but Ben can't let it rest any longer. "If being here is making you sick, you need to go back to where you came from."

She shakes her head. Immediately, her fingers fly to her eyelids, regretting the jerking motion. "Even if I could find an active nexus, to access the World Between Worlds, the odds of my returning to the same exact time and place I left from are statistically impossible. Who's to say I would even survive the journey? The damage is done. I don’t regret it."

"Rey, you're young. You have so many years left, to live and be happy."

"I’ve lived long enough without you. I’m not interested in doing that anymore."

"I'll come too."

"No." She grasps his wrist. He feels her flickering Force rear up and sink again. "Then it'll just be you dissolving away, not me. It's not up for discussion."

He leans back, working his mouth. She is _so_ stubborn. If Snoke were here now, he would tell him, _use the anger. Use your fear. It is power, and power finds a way_. As if in answer, something Snoke-like skirts around the edge of his mind, flicking like a snake-tongue. He shoves the traitor thoughts away. Fear and anger are jealous masters. He will not share Rey.

She is already dozing, so he leaves it, for now.

***

When he exhausts the healthy limits of watching her sleep, he gets up and pokes around her hut. The altar of sunlight on the windowsill, with his poem and her wire doll, and the now-dried flowers he's brought, is more beautiful to him than a still life in the high metropolitan museums of Coruscant. He takes out her clothes and folds them tidily, the way he was taught as a boy. Looking back on it, there have been some none-too-subtle signs that Rey is a desert-raised orphan. Her reverence for food. Her haphazard personal habits. Sadness pinions him through the breast. If only she hadn't been alone. If only he could have saved her. Something important floats on the peripheral of his consciousness, like a speck of dust on the eye. It dodges every time he tries to fix it.

As he smooths Rey’s clothing into a trunk, his fingers brush something solid, and he withdraws a holograph. Another. And another. He shouldn't look at them, but he glances over his shoulder to see Rey sleeping, her chest sinking and billowing, like a sail on a calm sea. He sits back on his heels and clicks the first holo to life. It is of a little girl, gap-toothed and big-eyed, with curling black hair, and Ben knows without a doubt that this is Paige. He clicks the next one. It is the same little girl, with two people who must be her parents. Ben studies them, as if a lexicon in their features, some secret behind their eyes, can give him a remedy. He is a prince in a fairy tale, he feels, and he knows, if he can just ask the right question, speak the right word ... he can save her.

When he lights the third holo, it takes time for his mind to translate what he sees: the curved nose, and the sullen, wide mouth; the raven wings of hair. And the amber-dark irises, in the dull eggshell whites, looking into him like a mirror from the long corridors of the past.

"Ben...?"

The quiet with which she speaks his name is refracted in the icicle atmosphere.

He turns and with him, he brings the holograph, the picture of his own self in shadow and static.

She lies propped on an elbow, and he can see plainly through to her fear.

He stutters a laugh. Though he couldn’t say why. He has the absence of feeling he has the first thirty seconds after an insect sting, before the pain inflames and spreads. He turns the holo off but continues to stare at it. “It was me. The man you loved, who died ... it was me, wasn't it?"

She puts a hand to her throat, as though searching for the place where her voice has been.

"All this time, I thought… I thought with you it was different, that I..." He shakes his head. Looks at her with the wide-open, dead eyes of a gutted fish. "Why did you lie to me?"

Her voice is the crackle of breaking ice. "I didn't lie."

"No," he says, firm, and his own voice rises like a precipice. "No!" He points, every part of him quaking. "That's what _he_ said. That’s what-- don’t. _Don’t_. You're _just_ like him."

She opens her mouth, but he cuts her off like a razor. "Was it you? Did _you_ kill me? _Do_ you?"

Her sobbed inhale is all the confession he needs.

Statuary calm replaces his quaking. "Ah. You do."

Something in what he has said triggers her. She jolts upward. Flame licks back to life in her. "No. No, I killed Kylo Ren. I mean, Kylo Ren was--!"

He follows her to his feet. But the whiplash he feels is not in the body. "How--do you know--that name? _Who told you that!_ "

She tries to thrust toward him, but he raises a hand to stay her. His next words hiss, like the dousing of fire. "Did _Snoke_ send you?"

The thought chokes. As though summoned, Snoke comes barrelling through Ben’s mind, pulping his tentative defences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you @englishable, the best beta a fan could ask for. She loves the story in all the right places.
> 
> Thank you for reading. I love reviews!


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a (partial) character death in this chapter.

> _Heb ei fai, heb ei eni._ He who has no faults is not born. -- Welsh proverb

Rey has eaten too little. Or perhaps slept too much. Lived too long, on borrowed time. Whatever it is, her consciousness leaves her, and when it returns, she cannot sense Ben Solo anywhere on the planet.

She staggers, listless, through the blue-ing fields of evening, as the torches flick awake and the stars pick out their patterns like pins in a quilt. So many stars. Each one of them a host to worlds, each world among them a possible port for Ben to retreat.

_Please, Force, let him be safe._

How did she come to speak that name? _Kylo Ren_. Whatever he names himself, she doesn't care; she has outgrown the stubborn division of him into one or the other, the need to signal his goodness to herself with a name. But she hates that he will wear it like a mask, to try to hide him away from himself. "Your son is dead," he will say. 

But what will possess him to wish Ben Solo dead in the first place? It is too much for him. And now she has gone and pressed the weight of his future onto him along with the yoke of the past. No wonder time is split thin, unraveled and laid out like a string; all together, it is too much for a single soul to bear.

When she came looking for him, on the other side of tomorrow, she gathered the rind-bitter fruits of all their strained and fleeting interactions with the fading blossoms of what could have been. She came for that reason. Wanted him for that reason. But she has grown to love him anew, a second time, the way a sun re-learns how to love the earth in spring. 

She has heard someone say, we never love the same person. People are mutable as seascapes, with leagues of depth, sheltering secrets no light nor eye has seen. She knows a bit about it from the loves of her past life, from Finn and Rose and Paige. She knows from herself. 

She knows it even more now. Because she could spend several lifetimes with Ben -- this Ben, that Ben, any Ben -- and never know him fully. He is not just his past, nor his future, nor even the collection of experiences she has of him. He is too full for just one finite mortal's understanding; her fear of unfaithfulness dies like the last ember on a cooling hearth. Every second she loves him she is unfaithful because every moment he is different. 

But then, isn't that the very nature of faith? To make a decision at a single point in time, and to carry it over for all the times that follow?

Her decision is long made.

Rey converges with Luke in the wide lawns beneath the summer sky; they are two rapids whose paths are fated to converge because all things run into the ocean, in the end. Ben Solo is the center, the final Jedi, the last Skywalker.

"What has happened?" Rey sees the fear in the lines of his face, crumbling like stone. "The Force screamed in him, and then -- he's just gone. What did he do?"

"He didn't do anything.” Rey snaps. Then she brings her voice down from the peak of its anger and draws a centering breath. "This is our doing. Yours and mine. Let him hurt; let him rage. He is entitled to that, at least."

***

Ben writhes inwardly, like a worm shrinking away from flame, even as outside his body moves, sure of its functions. Whatever law keeps the planets in motion carries him now. As for his thoughts, every path they take scorches.

He thought Rey loved someone else, and that hurt. Then he thought he could be the person she wanted, and that hurt less. Last she said she loved him for him, and that hurt the least of all. Only to find out that the person she loved was him all along. So which was true? Did she love the man who died, or does she love him now? Was he even really the same person? 

His thoughts dart from one to the other, circling back on themselves. 

The man Rey loved is him. She had assured him she loves him, in so much more than words. He thought, hoped, that something could finally be his: only to learn that even that was stolen from him, by his very self. 

Rey loves him -- not for him, the misfit Jedi, Luke Skywalker's troubled prodigy -- but for some future version of him she pities for her role in his death. 

And how did she know him? How far into the future? Was there a Rey, a younger one, out there right now? Was she watching him, biding her time, perhaps cocking an ear to the viscous whispers of Snoke? Ben can't bear the thought of them, colluding together, laughing at him. He can hate Snoke, it is safe to hate him. But Rey...

Tears burn but he hardly feels them; they are nothing to the humiliation, the blistering hurt of last night's tenderness twisted into a mocking, graven image. He can't even care that Snoke tears through his mind, scouring every last corner with brutal thoroughness. Snoke is not gentle, he’s never _been_ gentle. At least, in this one thing, he is not deceitful. Ben always knows what to expect; he can’t be dashed by heartache if he’s not first been pieced together.

When she spoke the name -- the half of it a childhood fantasy only Snoke could have known -- it knocked something loose that only just approached wholeness.

Thus occupied, Snoke is able to ring his claws through Ben’s impuissant mind; Ben screams.

Then, stillness, and the absence of pain that comes as no relief.

_Come to me_ , Snoke says. _Come_. 

***

On the nursery planet, in the Unknown Regions, Snoke awaits him. He has the body of a man but it has formed in the dank like a mushroom, the soft flesh flayed and grown in on itself. Indeed, his nature is that of fungus. He knows the boy must come to him. He has been drawing him ever closer, sometimes in curves that seem to steer away, but always ringing back again, closing inward. He has burrowed so deep into him that Ben Solo has no hope of getting rid of him. For a time, Ben might silence him. Push him beyond a screen where he could neither see, nor hear. But Snoke is there. He will always _be_ _there_. He sucks his strength from the marrow, even as the boy grows in grace and power.

Ben has been here before, in the humid greenhouse sphere, lush with growing things both terrible and tender; where Snoke has retreated to hide behind an impenetrable curtain of darkness no practical knowledge nor Force instinct can draw. Only Ben can find him, for Ben has been shown.

He is half-dead, dragging himself forward, more automaton than man, an addict helpless to resist the pull of habit. The hollows around his eyes dull their shining intelligence -- that living fight that first rang a stentorian clear note into the Force, from the moment of his existence. Snoke’s gluttony for it is perfect in its thoroughness; a self-swallowing, self-perpetuating emptiness.

He walks toward Ben beneath the leafy shade under the hard-eyed stars. There is no need for hurry. The snake is already in the garden.

"Did I not say they would betray you?"

"Yes, Snoke."

"Open your mind to me, boy. Give yourself over to me, and you will know unquenchable power, to staunch the sweet, inexorable pain."

"Yes, Snoke."

Ben walks into Snoke's open arms.

***

Snoke ravages Ben's mind, taking no care for what he tramples or tears. It is his own kind of love, a consuming and blackening and shriveling like the furnace at the center of a dying star. He is not a gentle gardener, no gardener at all; a gardner uses the gate. Rather, Snoke scales the walls of Ben's secret garden and reaps, without consent, what he finds there. 

There, in a sheltered corner sealed with flowering thorns, Snoke finds her. He pushes into the power: a muted, secret glow, no more than bioluminescent algae patterning the ocean surface on a calm night. It flares in response to his putrescent breath.

At the last, there is some resistance. The boy, even in anguish, tries to shelter her from Snoke. But it is too late. Everything Ben knows, Snoke knows. And there are things Snoke knows that Ben does not: where Snoke came from, what his purpose is. The significance of the girl, who camouflaged her Force signature so well he might never have picked up on her, if the boy hadn't brought her to him.

Ben's mind is crushed in an avalanche of darkness, and all the light goes out.

***

Ben has taken the Grimtaash, leaving his droid, his navigation, his tracking … anything by which they could follow and find him. Rey does not need to tell his uncle that she feels Ben still, but it is the garbled signal of a broken transmission. In the well where the Force flows, he is a tangled black mass, with no way in.

Days pass like the short turn of a wheel. Rey sleeps. She dreams. In her liminal state, she thinks she sees him: the older him, with the scar she gave him, and the angry withheld tears, telling her, _let go_.

"Ben?" Her voice sounds small and distant, and she cannot be sure she isn't dreaming. "Where are you?"

_Let me go, Rey._

She shakes her head. No.

He speaks again. The voice is outside, but all around her.

"Reeeey." The playful lilt distorts it into something sinister. "Did you call for him, Rey?"

She sits up, perspiration clinging to every corner and surface; outside her hut the stars glow like studded gems in the ceiling of a cathedral. Had day come at all? She can't remember.

She hears his voice again, real but wrong, coming from a distinct point outside, and she scrambles from the bed and throws open the door. The night is still and limpid, but an unseen miasma squats demonic over the sleeping academy. She pauses but a moment, to draw her lightsaber from beneath her pillow.

She steps out, following the call of his voice, carrying to her over the clear air. It leads her to the center of the grounds, up the cold marble steps of the temple, and into that columned, open space, with the mural mosaic of dark and light -- of balance -- enthroned like a heart at its breast. She stops to stare down at it. Her feet are bare; only now she feels they are cold.

"Hello, Rey." A shadow moves from between the columns to her side, and takes familiar shape. Ben steps into the light of night -- which is softer than day but far more treacherous, for it can play tricks, as Rey now fears. His face comes awash into light, however, and it is him.

He speaks then, smile curling the corners of his mouth, devastating and devouring. "Your grandfather has need of you. You'll come with me."

The nascent smile dies on her lips. "No. Ben, no."

"Ben is dead," he says, the sickly grin marring the calla lily beauty of his face. "I'm Kylo Ren now. Isn't he the one you wanted?"

Her stricken features contort into a scowl. "Stop it. This isn't you. Stop it now!"

A lightsaber sings, rending the silence like a cloth. Rey pivots, throwing her arm out in instinct, ready to defend.

"Rey, step away from him." It is Luke. His saber brands the dark.

Rey widens her arms. "No!"

From the column-toothed mouth of the temple, a second and third body emerge. She can see Tai first, his smooth head reflective, as is his gentle mind. But then Voe steps in front of him, cutting off his sympathetic sight, with her saber flaring.

"He's gone, Rey," Voe shouts to her, as though a crevasse divides them. "Can't you feel the darkness? It's taken over him completely. Master Skywalker! You feel it too, don’t you?”

Master Skywalker can neither confirm nor deny. Indecision renders him impotent. He grips his saber. “Has it come to pass then … just just as I feared?"

Rey places herself between the two Skywalkers, igniting the amber of her own saber. "Fear can’t hurt you,” she says. “Only what you do with that fear. I will not give up on him; and neither will you! You will not do this, not this time. You are supposed to love him and protect him!"

Luke sputters, over the flare of his blue beam. "Who _are_ you? And who is _he_ to you?"

"I am your future," she bares her teeth, "and he is the man who comes to my aid to save the galaxy and lay down his life for mine!"

Ben moves behind her. Rey whirls, just in time to block a thrust from his elegant lightsaber. It is whole but it jumps, nervous as an untamed animal -- its growing instability pulling from its master's fractured state of mind. Somewhere near the hilt, Rey thinks it flickers red. Ben leans into her with his solid weight, and if not for the Force propping her, Rey would not be able to withstand him. When they are close, so close as to be a breath away from a lovers’ kiss, he speaks low, for only her to hear. "You shouldn't have let me inside you, Rey." He tsks. "A Jedi is not meant to have vain attachments. And now you are weak."

Her adrenaline floods her veins, igniting her blood like the combustible powder of a firework; she throws him.

Ben laughs, staggering backward. "There she is. The heir of Palpatine. Such beautiful sumptuous darkness. Come with me, and he will make you well, and we will be what we were meant to be, Rey, you and me. Kylo Ren and his consort, bringing the legacy of our grandfathers to fruition."

Rey comes at him again with a tight stroke, like a warning. 

He parries with ease. 

"Come back to me, Ben!"

But she cannot reach him. He has knotted himself into a tangle of thorns too tight for her to penetrate.

She knows what she has to do. He twirls his laser, almost languid, and thrusts toward her. Rey lets her saber drop.

His slides through cleanly, impaling her on his brokenness and wrath even as he had previously on his love, sending up the smell of burnt flesh like incense. 

She feels nothing at first. All she sees are the dark wells of his eyes, darker the space between stars, holding her to him even as she is pinned to his body in the antithesis of embrace. Something in his pupils shifts, or the light in them, like comets travelling over water.

Then she falls. Is caught. Lowered to the ground.

"Rey." His voice -- and it is his voice again, low and gentle -- breaks with the dullness of skull beneath a bludgeon. "Oh my God, R-Rey ... what have I done?"

She takes a moment to regret what she is about to do. The gash, ragged and wet, in the thicket immuring him, caused by her recklessness: a way in. 

Rey plunges into his mind, with all the force of her training and all the power of her blood. Into the wild growth of his neurons and synapses, following the overgrown, bramble-choked pathways of thought and pain and memory. She finds Snoke, where he roots, mouldering into the soft, dark soil, soaking away all the nutrients deposited by the showering, stubborn light, which throws up delicate netting of cyan and gold, and every colour known and unknown to the human eye. They clash, mind to mind, will to will. Kind for kind, the parasite can withstand anything but itself.

She drives the monster out.

But Rey has caused as much damage in healing as Snoke did in sickening. She used to hate this _destruction_ in her, the inheritance of abominable blood. The crackling, scabbing tar that stains, but -- it serves its purpose. And it is not _all_ she is.

So she shows him. She shows her soul to him, naked and unafraid, their minds touching, sliding and mingling, deliciously together and apart; shows him to himself the way she sees him, a boy worthy of love by virtue of her loving him. That is all he is, and all he needs to be. Loved, and love.

With the last of her strength, she goes back and forth, mending with a gossamer string, like the lines that criss-crossed her path in the World Between Worlds. She turns the soil, and plants her own life into him. She sows her memories and experiences of them, together, the holes of her life she feared to fill. Everything she knows, he knows. She feels herself wearing thin, but she pushes on. 

In the last, she plants a memory -- but it cannot be a memory, for she has not lived it. In the lonely wreck of her childhood, Ben comes to her and gives her something.

The vision she has is of the two of them; passing a light back and forth, back and forth.

***

She wakes to Ben cradling her, and for a moment, she believes she must be back on Exegol, after he revived her. She feels no pain.

Someone -- she thinks it must be Master Skywalker, for he alone would dare, though others have stirred and joined Tai and Voe, called to the upheavel -- someone tries to step toward them. Ben thrusts his saber out snarls. "Stay. Back. _Don't touch her_." His wildfire eyes gleam with trace madness, the way poison lingers in the blood; she creeps her hand over his wrist, to the hilt of his saber, and unswitches it. He needs no further prompting to drop the weapon and clutch her anew. He adjusts her closer, huddling her to the trunk of his body, leaning over her face as though to wash it with tears. 

"I can fix this," he says, "Rey, I know now, I understand. You showed me everything. I can heal you. I've done it before. I'll do it again."

He paws at her belly to cover the wound, but she catches his hand. He is content to let her gather it to her chest, like an injured bird.

"I can't, I'm ... I'm already too far gone, Ben. I can't survive here. I don't belong."

"N-n," he starts to stutter his objection but cannot finish before sobs crash into him like whitecaps on a rocky beach. He squeezes his eyes shut, searching in vain for control -- but control has never been his strong point.

"Remember what I told you? By the lake?”

“That I could be anybody or nobody, and it didn’t matter, because I’m somebody to _you_.”

“Do you understand now?”

His throat contracts, and she follows the curve of it, feeling a deep and stilling satisfaction knowing the blood pumps, robust and quickening.

"Listen to me," she says. She adjusts the grip of her hand on his, still holding it to her breast. 

“On a backwater desert planet called Jakku, there is a little scavenger girl. Her name is Rey, and she is waiting for you."

He shudders in a reluctant inhale. Nods in understanding. "My dreams, they're yours -- your memories. We're connected, over time and space. That's how you found me."

She coughs; a fleck of crimson glisters on her bottom lip.

A tremor passes over his face, like the disturbance in a tarn from deep below, and then it stills. "I'll find you, Rey. I'll come back for you, sweetheart, I promise."

She blinks, and something settles like snow, quietening the rough terrain of her mind. Of course. Those words. She heard those words before, waited for them all her life.

"Rey," he says, his voice low; he tames his trembling mouth into a smile; she thinks, she could not do better than live and die in that smile. "Before he died, your Kylo Ren ... he did love you."

She gasps; her breath has left her and though her lungs scrabble to replace it, they find no relief. "Truly?"

The light in his face is something like the rose-glow of dawn, slow-rising but insistent, impossible to douse. She has seen it before. "Truly. I know. Because _I_ do."

She feels her body fade. Perhaps she is going to join the Force, as he did when she held him, at the end of a battle that seemed the end of the world. The last thing she sees is his earnest face, transfigured by impossible tenderness, looking down into hers, and she thinks, _hope_. _Her name will be Hope_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was difficult, one of those disorganised, half-baked lumps of writing that needs beating into shape, and I couldn't have done it without englishable. There is at least one more chapter. Please comment and tell me I'm not the only angsty, over-invested romantic!


	18. Chapter 18

_Hope_.

Rey wakes, feeling the reverberation of some great loss in the galaxy of her body as well as the stars. She has the sensation of having been crying, though her eyes are dry. Sometimes she dreams herself on a jungle planet, with more water than she has seen in her life, and some sort of wizards who use lasers for wands. She has not dreamed that now, at least not that she remembers. She picks herself up, lugs on her boots, and squints into the sun-scalded sand sea. Just another day on Jakku.

For days after, she has the sense of something coming. The last one is particularly bad; ambushed by four teedos who swipe her scavenged booty, as well as her water, leaving her unconscious on the cooling sand for half a day -- maybe longer. All Rey knows when she wakes is that she is so thirsty, so weak. She drags herself to the AT-AT, where she lies down on her pallet and falls into a black sleep.

When she wakes again, her whole body hurts. It _aches_ , on a molecular level, thirsting for what she cannot provide. She crawls to the entrance of her home, at the AT-AT’s belly, thinking to strike out in search of help; but her limbs are so heavy. How can she make it to the settlement in the blistering heat? And once there, how can she be guaranteed someone will take pity on her and give her water?

She backs up. She puts what little items she has to call hers around the collection of rags that suffices as a bed: there is a scrap doll, a shriveled flower carcass, a helmet from the Rebellion in the days before the New Republic. She adjusts them tenderly, like friends, lowers herself onto the rags, and waits to die.

She drifts in and out of sleep for a long time. Night comes and goes.

Then she is aware she is not alone. Someone is with her. Someone who lifts her head and puts cool fresh water to her lips for her to drink. She wants to swallow it all, wants to drown in it, but the skin holding the water is pulled back and her head lowered down again. She sleeps once more.

When she wakes, she again feels the presence of someone. "Wh-who's there?" Her throat is arid.

A voice, familiar and yet nothing she has ever heard before, speaks. "It's okay. You're going to be okay now, Rey."

She turns her head, and sees the deep-blue cast of a man outlined in the Jakku sun. He sits in the doorway. Her eyes fumble to hold him: he is big, broad, but somehow folded in on himself. His face is cream-white and flecked with moles -- a strange face, but gentle in its severity -- and the dark eyes, like midnight and all the promises that come and sit and sing to the mind that waits for sleep. He is wearing a winding sheet like the one she uses to wrap herself, crossing her torso.

"Who are you?"

"My name's Ben. I've come to take you home, sweetheart, like I promised."

***

They knew enough not to try to move him. Ben clung to the linen strip she habitually wore, the only thing left after her body transitioned, particles dispersing to join the greater universe.

He didn’t know how long he sat there -- it could have been a minute, or the entire evening. When he looked up again, the temple was empty, save for Luke, and a limpid blue rimmed the horizon, heralding dawn.

Rey knew what she was doing when she charged him to find her. She wanted herself to be with him, in whatever fashion, it's true, but she also knew he would need this mission to keep from collapsing inward, to stave off the guilt while it raged higher than fever. He rose, fabric balled in his fists, and approached Luke. Luke watched, waiting.

"Snoke is dead," Ben said. "He tormented me my entire life. In here," he braced his temple with his fingers. "But the one who sent him is still out there. I will help you, any way I can, but there is something I have to do first."

Luke nodded. To the uninitiated, his face would appear a mask of composure, but Ben knew better. Luke mourned, too.

***

It takes some coaxing, but Ben is able to get the girl -- _Rey_ \-- into the Grimtaash and into a bunk. He has brought her doll, but says there are more flowers where he is taking her than she could ever want. She mumbles about not wanting to miss her parents, but he promises to leave a message for anyone that should come looking for her and to bring her back, if she is not happy. He does not particularly think this is a lie. If she asks to go back, he will take her, but he is prepared to remain. 

Then Rey crawls so pathetically toward him, that he scoops her up without a thought. Holding her to his chest, he could crush her. He stands there for several minutes, suspended between a brutality and gentleness that he knows he will struggle to balance all his life.

"You feel warm," she says, speaking into the fabric of his tunic. He wonders how very sick she must be, to feel a chill in that desert place. "I think you must be a nice man." His heart gorges on the sound of her voice.

He puts an IV in her arm, to get fluids and nutrients to her, and she sinks back into sleep. He can't conceptualise what he feels, looking over her as she breathes the even, untroubled breath of dreamlessness: the relief mixing with incongruity (he is the elder for a change, and she is still a child), currents of warm and cool that brew storms. If she were like the Rey who met him at the academy, he would not trust his senses. But about this Rey, he has no doubts. Her mere proximity heightens the Force around them to a pitch above sound, felt like the humming of insects inside the heart of a tree or the rumble of water moving over a long distance. He can peer into her mind with the ease of opening a book, finger held to the place just left off reading. They have always been together. If someone held up a mirror and told him he was himself, he could not have been any less certain that she was his, and he hers. She is small, stunted for her age, but he knows her, in the instantaneous way he knows all things about her, to be about thirteen. Her face is both fresh and emaciated, her lips cracked.

Even as he watches her, the tears slip out, and he has to tell himself -- has to believe -- that she is the same -- she _is._ Because he was the same self for Rey when she crossed the World Between Worlds to find him. She loved him then, and she loved him again. If we are only a collection of moments, then we must exist at our fullest, in some sense, in each one of them, independent of the rest. If she loves him now, she loved him then. If he loved her then, he loves her now.

He will bring the girl Rey first to his parents. He will say to them, you will care for her and protect her, the way you ought to have cared for and protected me. When she is better, I will take her to the academy, where she will be with others like her, under the tutelage of the finest Jedi. I must go away for now: the enemy is out there. But when I purge him from this galaxy, I will come back for her. She is my dyad in the Force, and no power, in this life or the next, will separate us.

***

Han steers the Millennium Falcon to port, and before Ben is even down the ramp, a dark moving projectile hurls itself at him. He catches Rey, whose arms and legs splay around his body, making a substantial garment of herself.

He sets her down, and she steps to his side to give him an unobscured view of the smaller woman coming on her heels, further in years, but beautiful in her maturity. The greys in her hair are like the veins of marble, braided and looped around the formality of her face. Her smile speaks a bit like apology. But Ben steps forward and embraces her.

"Mother."

"I'm glad," she says, no need to finish, _I'm glad you're back_.

Leia peers around the mountain of her son to size up the son's father. "You look like you took on some of the attributes of the natives when you liaised in Kashyyyk with Chewie. Both of you. Come inside and get bathed and dressed. Dinner is almost ready."

She turns, and no one is sure how she can make such a simple action look both elegant and commanding. Han passes, knocking his son amicably on the back, "Better do as she says, hm?" He walks backwards a few steps -- his mouth pressing downward in distress, but his eyes laugh -- before swinging around and hurrying after his long-suffering wife.

Rey hooks her arm around Ben's and tugs for his attention. "I don't like that you don't let me communicate with you, when you go on a mission."

They start to walk the length of the landing pad, toward the building that houses his mother's private accommodation, a penthouse at the uppermost spire of one of Hosnian Prime’s most prestigious quadrants.

"It's not safe," he says, "you know that."

"Exactly. I worry. I want to check in on you! Even if we can't jump to each other, like we're used to." She uses the word _jump_ to mean their presence to one other across dimension, something more than apparition.

They cross the doorway out of the cloud-obscured sunlight and into the greater shade of the interior. Ben allows himself to take inventory of her: she is thicker now, put on muscle around the ribs and thighs. Her arms are still skinny, but shaped in strength. She is tall, as tall as she will be, if he recalls correctly, and he does. Her unfiltered youth is not the absence of hardship but the robust vitality thriving in spite of it.

"We can't be sure Palpatine is truly gone. And if he isn't, I can't risk him getting a lock on you through me."

The mention of her grandfather makes her reflective. It has been explained to her, gradually, mostly by him. When Luke attempted it, he got a bloody nose. Ben had to do reconnaissance for days afterward, assuring his young soulmate that she is good, that no power or person could threaten that goodness, nor him away from her.

He is not dressed in Jedi garments. Indeed, he left the order shortly after bringing Rey to it. Perhaps, if he had been allowed to come to it of his own free will, he would have chosen it. As it stands, he has too much room in himself to explore other identities, playing out possibilities as numerous as the branching of trees. Rey doesn't pretend to understand this about him: she is so stalwart in her desire to please and pursue perfection, to become a master Jedi knight; it worries him sometimes. But then, she supports him in whatever he seems to need, as the years come and go, and he believes she knows he would do the same.

“You haven’t seen the boy, have you? The one I described to you?”

“No,” he shakes his head, speaking her description back to her to assuage her, “large, full-lipped mouth … broad nose, dark skin … kind eyes … Rey, I don’t think I would recognise him even if I did come across him.”

“I would know him,” Rey says, with certainty. “I would know him through you, if you did.”

He considers that she is not wrong.

"Voe's not picking on you any more, is she?"

Rey makes a face, but it is not one of distress. "If she does, I'll threaten her with the time you told me, about how she cried because she couldn't get down from a tree."

"That should do it." Ben smirks.

"And anyway, I'm not afraid of her. Even if sometimes, it seems like she is afraid of me."

Most of them are a bit afraid of her, knowing she is a Palpatine, though not more afraid than they are of a wrathful and protective Ben Solo. She does not answer, however, to that officious name. On her registration, she goes by the name his mother never got to: Skywalker.

Ben looks at her, wondering where her thoughts take her, whether she leaves the here and now when she visits the other, older parts of her, or if she tugs them toward her to examine and put away again.

"And Luke?" he says quietly.

Rey's eyes slot over to him, and she looks at him in that appraising way. "Master Skywalker treats me well. You'd know if he didn't."

He nods and breaks their eye contact.

"Come on, you two," the brassy, bossy droid, C-3PO, marches in his right-angled way toward them. "You can catch up over dinner!"

***

It is not exactly what he wanted to do fresh off a military mission. After bathing, shaving, and dressing, he’d have been happy to lie down and eat from off of his stomach like a makeshift table; but Ben comforts himself in knowing neither his father, nor Rey, are wholehearted participants either.

The dining room is drenched in lights; the clouds blown away while he dressed. The table is long and tall, and the chairs high-backed and uncomfortable. The service droids move around, filling glasses, setting down platters. His mother has put herself at the head of the table, with Han to her left. Next to his father, Ben sits, and across from him, to Leia’s right, sits Rey.

Ben picks up a silver fish fork and absently taps the prongs on the rim of his plate, so that Rey knows which utensil to use for this course.

“God, Leia, can’t we just eat like normal people, for once?” Han voices the concerns of them all.

Leia darkens her gaze at him. “This is eating like normal. The way you eat is like a man who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from and can’t be bothered even if he did.”

His eyebrows go up and he half-shrugs, waving his hand in a gesture of compliance.

Ben winks at Rey from across the table, and she has to cover her mouth to keep from smiling with it full of food.

“Maybe you’ll be interested in sticking around for a while,” Leia says meaningfully. “And how about you, Ben? How long can we expect you home?”

He waits to chew and swallow, before answering. “A few days, at most. There’s been reports of disappearances and kidnapping around Hays Minor. We think it’s likely they’re First Order reapings.”

“You're leaving _again_?" Rey’s fork hovers over her plate. She seems to have forgotten its purpose. Looks at it bewilderdly before setting it down.

Ben adjusts his mouth, the exterior action of him chewing his words. "I have to. I’d never be able to sleep at night knowing there were still functioning First Order arms out there, kidnapping and brainwashing children."

Rey swallows, her throat like a bird’s. “I know, I just … thought that … maybe we’d get married this time…”

Ben and Han choke simultaneously, requiring a robust swig of wine. Leia looks at Rey over her folded hands, unfazed. "Rey dear, I’ve been over this with you; at sixteen, you are far too young to enter marriage. You _know_ that."

"Not if I have the consent of a legal guardian," she says. Her eyes flutter up to Ben’s briefly before returning to her plate.

Ben very nearly chokes again, but Leia intervenes, "Not without the consent of _both_ your legal guardians. And whatever you can coax from out of Ben you'll be hard pressed to get from me." She ends with the finality of someone entirely confident her word is law.

Ben looks down at his plate, feeling his eyebrows creep up to his hairline, lips pressed into a line somewhere between horror and smile.

***

After dinner, they are excused into the courtyard. It is a stone, roofless hollow in the center of Leia’s apartments, exposed to the sun and air so that the fountains and plants flourish as they would in a grounded garden.

The central fountain is shaped like a woman, reaching toward the sun. The water runs down her skirts and ruffles into the cool blue pool. Rey sits cross-legged at the edge, elbows on knees, face on fists, looking into. Ben hovers over, meeting her gaze in the water’s surface.

"How old?"

"What?" He leans a little further, locking her eyes in their reflections.

"How old do I have to be to marry you?"

He sighs. Skirts his glance around the semi-shaded courtyard. "Let's say ... at least twenty-five."

"Twenty-five! That's years from now. You'll be an old man!"

"I'm sorry?" he laughs.

"Why can't it be eighteen? Eighteen is the age of majority on all Inner Rim systems!"

"That's still too young, Rey. How about ... twenty-one."

"Nineteen."

"Twenty."

"Deal!"

She grabs his hand and tugs him down to sit next to her. He crosses his legs as she has, and she leans her head against his upper arm.

"You don't want to marry me right now, Rey, how can you? You're not even grown yet."

"You think just because I'm young I can't know my own mind?" 

"No, it's just ... what if it changes? You may not want to marry me in four years' time. You may want someone else."

She stares at him solemnly in the pool when she says, "I'll never want anyone else." She looks at him with steely eyes and he sees his Rey, the older one, staring out at him, and the combination joy and loss winds him. It is her, it dawns on him, not for the first time and not for the last. She's in there. All that we ever will be and all that we ever have been are connected. "...How would that work, anyway? Like any potential suitor of mine is going to be okay with sharing his wife with the other half of her dyad? 'Oh, we only read each other's thoughts, feel each other's emotions, and are psychically linked at all times across time and space.' That's not awkward _at all_!"

He chuckles, which seems to please her.

The minutes drain by in golden silence. Then she says, "I remember it, you know. Not all, but ... snatches here and there."

"Remember ...?"

"You and me. By a lake. In a garden."

Ben's face floods with blood; he jerks his hand out of hers. "Oh my God."

"How am I supposed to put off wanting you when I've got ... _that_ ... in my head?" She makes a gesture.

Ben covers his face with his hands. " _Oh my God_."

"Stop saying that."

"Look, that ... _happened_ ... and you obviously remember, the part of you that was there when ..." He bites back the urge to swear again.

"Who's sixteen now?" she says, bumping her shoulder into his arm playfully, before sobering. “Do you … you know … remember things? Things you’ve never done or seen?”

“Sometimes. I see … you and me, fighting in a snowy wood. I don’t know why we’re fighting, but I know I don’t want to hurt you. Even so, you slash me across the face, and I wear the scar for the rest of my days.”

He realises only then what he has said, and that he shouldn’t have said it. Her lips quiver. She knows most of what there is to know about his past -- how she came to him, how he killed her. How in dreams he returns to that night, to wake with his own hands around his throat.

“Do you really think _he_ could still be out there?”

“It’s possible. My grandfather killed him once before, but … _hey_. Come here," he slings an arm around her, pulling her into him, and she takes it as an invitation to throw her leg over his crossed ones and climb into his lap.

“Even if he does come back, we’ll deal with him. Together.”

“Together?”

He nods, even though she cannot see him from where she burrows into the folds of his jacket.

Ben silently prays that his mother doesn't enter to find them this way. But his Rey speaks into his chest so that it feels like her words originate in his own heart. "I know what I want, Ben. They are only two things in the whole universe: to be a Jedi knight, and you."

"I know, sweetheart," he says, letting his fingers thread through the hair at the nape of her neck. "And you will. Have me. You already do."

She tilts her head up to look into his face with a sly grin. "So I can sleep in your room with you tonight, right?"

"Not a chance."

***

They rest and play and explore the winding ways and quarters of Hosnian Prime. Rey vacillates between wonder and anxiety at the largeness of the ecumenopolis -- she was here once before, when he first brought her from Jakku, but then she never left the shelter of Leia’s wings.

It ends too soon: Leia has responsibilities still, though she is no longer a senator; Rey must return to the academy; Ben is needed badly, with his skill and his insight, to aid the resistance against what remains of the First and Final Orders

Ben insists on being the one to take Rey back to the temple and settle her in. She is ecstatic, wanting to show him everything. Their arrival throws the entire rhythm of academy life off its axis, to Voe's supreme annoyance. Those old enough to remember Ben are uneasy around him, except for Tai. Tai is a constant like gravity, a never-changing principle. He is Rey’s guardian angel when Ben cannot be. 

As for the new younglings, they are gratified to learn that Rey's imaginary friend is real. They question him with the solemnity of children.

"You are here, with Rey, even though we can't see you?"

"Not all the time. It's like when you call home on the holovid. You see your mother and father and sisters and brothers, even though they are far away, don’t you?"

"Only it feels like he's really here, and in a way he is," Rey explains.

"Because you're a dyad."

"Yes," Ben says, "I suppose that is so."

"Master Skywalker says that a dyad is rarer than rain on Tatooine. That the Force produces one only once a millennia. But you don’t look like a ‘power like life itself, unseen for generations.’"

When it is time for him to leave, Rey walks him to the hangar beyond the copse of trees. As they go, Ben catches sight of Luke; he pauses to acknowledge his uncle. Luke nods. For now, their ceasefire holds.

Ben walks around his starship, which he borrowed from his mother since Han refused to part with the Falcon. He surveys that all tethers are released, all parts functioning. When he comes around the hull, Rey's tears pour twin trails down her cheeks. She threads her fingers together so that her knuckles go white.

He can't very well tell her everything is going to be okay, not when he is on the verge of tears himself. So he draws her aside, under the cover of the ship, takes her face in his hands, and kisses her.

Her surprise is palpable. But she recalibrates and presses her mouth into his, slinging her arms around his neck; he has to be the one to pull away. She is breathless, and he tries not to laugh because whatever she calls forth from the many-layered existences that make up her soul, in this lifetime, she is an innocent. They tip their foreheads together, and Rey says, like she is dropping a sum of credits onto the table before laying a winning hand of cards: "Eighteen."

Ben throws back his head and sets his laughter free. "Nineteen, then."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been a pleasure and a privilege taking this journey with you all. I hope you know how grateful I am to share this story with people who appreciate it as much as I do -- sometimes making me happy, sometimes sad, always scratching an itch that can only exist because of the galaxy far, far away that we love. So much thanks to the inestimable @englishable, who encouraged me to write the story and offered to beta. 
> 
> It would mean a lot to me if you shared this around, so other people could see what I made. I made a pretty thing! I made it with all of you! Thank you!

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on tumblr @theOriginalSuki.


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